Şivan Perwer

Şivan Perwer — Biography

Şivan Perwer came into the world as İsmail Aygün on December 23, 1955, in a village near Viranşehir in Şanlıurfa province. He took up Kurdish music from a young age and became a modern voice of the dengbêj oral tradition, weaving Kurdish identity, language, history and folklore through his work; early recordings such as Govenda Azadîxwazan and Kîne Em? reflect the social experience of the Kurdish people. He also set the poetry of Cigerxwîn to music, and the poet himself once called him "the voice of his poetry."

Barred from performing Kurdish-language music, he left Turkey for Germany in 1976, where he cut his first official album. In 1991 he appeared alongside Chris de Burgh, Madonna and Rod Stewart at a benefit concert for Iraqi Kurdish refugees, and in 2004 he founded a cultural foundation bearing his name in Frankfurt. He married Gülistan Perwer, a union that later ended in divorce, and, after thirty-seven years away, made a symbolic return to Diyarbakır on November 16, 2013, invited by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's prime minister at the time; he took part in a televised condolence gathering after his father, Yunus Aygün, died in 2018.

Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has released upwards of thirty albums, authored books, and been awarded several honorary doctorates, continuing to fuse traditional Kurdish musical forms with contemporary styles.