Zülfü Livaneli

Zülfü Livaneli — Biography

Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu, better known as Zülfü Livaneli, was born on 20 June 1946 in the Ilgın district of Konya to a family of Georgian descent; the family took its surname from the Livane Sanjak in Artvin's Yusufeli, their ancestral home, and his father, Mustafa Sabri Livanelioğlu, rose to become deputy president of the Court of Cassation. He learned to play the bağlama during summers in Ilgın from his uncle by marriage, Turhan Yücel, and later studied at the Fairfax Conservatory in the United States. Arrested several times for his political views after the 1971 military memorandum, he went into exile in Sweden in 1972; after being held for three months following the 1980 coup he left the country again, spending years in Stockholm, Paris, Athens and New York before returning to Turkey in 1984. He has composed nearly three hundred songs and around thirty film scores, including Yol and Sürü, and won the best composer award at Sanremo in 1999; as a director, Yer Demir Gök Bakır (1987) was awarded at San Sebastián and Sis (1988) at Valencia. His novel Mutluluk (2002) was adapted for film, and Son Ada won the Orhan Kemal Novel Award. He ran for mayor of Istanbul in 1994, finishing third, and served as a CHP member of parliament from 2002 to 2007, resigning from the party in 2005 to sit as an independent. He was UNESCO's Goodwill Ambassador from 1996 to 2016, resigning in protest over the destruction in Diyarbakır's Sur district. He married Ülker Tunçay in 1964; their daughter, musician Aylin Livaneli, was born in 1966.