Nese Yasin

(Cyprus, 1959) in her poetry not only tries to build a bridge between the Greek and Turkish part of Cyprus, but also in daily life. Her most famous poem ‘Which part' she wrote in 1974 but it is still important to her: ‘My father says: Do you love your fatherland? My fatherland has been split in half, which part must I love?’. The division of Cyprus remains an important theme in her work, but she also writes about youth traumas and love. The daughter of the Turkish poet Ozker Yasin, Yasin was born on the Turkish part of Cyprus, but lives in the Greek southern part. In 2006 she was the first Turkish Cypriot since 1963 to enter the parliamentary election on the Greek part. Yasin teaches Turkish-Cypriot literature at the Greek-speaking University of Cyprus. She also works as a radio journalist. She has published five books of poetry and a novel and has won several literary prizes. Her work has been translated into Greek, Hungarian, German and English. In the Netherlands a number of her poems were published in an anthology of Cypriot literature Wij wonen in een taal (We Live in a Language; 2004).