Ebru Gündeş

Ebru Gündeş — Biography

Born in Istanbul's Fatih district on 12 October 1974, Ebru Gündeş is the daughter of Remzi Gündeş, from Gaziantep, and Müjgan Bilgin; her parents separated while she was still young. Steered toward singing by a relative while she worked as a garment worker, she met Neşe Demirkat and signed with Raks Müzik, run by Selçuk Tekay and Koral Sarıtaş, singing backup for Emel Sayın before entering the studio herself. Her 1993 debut, Tanrı Misafiri, sold in the millions, and the albums that followed -- Sen Allah'ın Bir Lütfusun, Kurtlar Sofrası, Ben Daha Büyümedim and Tatlı Bela -- brought her three female-vocalist-of-the-year titles between 1994 and 1999.

A cerebral haemorrhage suffered while promoting a new record in 1999 pulled her out of the public eye for a time; in 2000 she gave the proceeds of a comeback concert to a hospital foundation. She also moved into hosting with her own program, Mega Show, where İbrahim Tatlıses and Serdar Ortaç were frequent guests, and sat on the judging panel of Popstar Alaturka in 2006-2008 and, intermittently, of O Ses Türkiye from 2013 onward; the poet Ataol Behramoğlu sued her over the unlicensed use of one of his poems.

Her 2019 album Âşık became Turkey's best-selling and most-downloaded release on its release day. Personally, she was married in turn to Hamdi Vardar, to lawyer Ömer Durak, and to businessman Reza Zarrab, with whom she has a daughter; a fourth marriage, to businessman Murat Osman Özdemir, began in 2024 and ended in separation the next year.