Oya Baydar

Oya Baydar (born 1940) is a Turkish sociologist and writer. For a long time she was involved in socialist politics.

Education and early works

She studied at Lycée Notre Dame de Sion Istanbul. She published her first novel, inspired by French writer Françoise Sagan, while she was a student in high school. The novel she wrote in the last year of high school, God Has Forgot Children, was published both in the newspaper Hürriyet and as a book. She was almost expelled from her school as a result of writing this novel. After these novels written in high school years, she had a break from writing, interesting herself in politics for a long time, before returning to literature in later life.

She graduated from Istanbul University's Department of Sociology in 1964 and entered this department as an assistant. The Professors' Council of the University twice rejected her doctoral thesis, about the rise of a labour force in Turkey: students held down the University in order to protest that. That was the first university occupation in Turkey. Baydar then became an assistant in Hacettepe University.