about
Cigdem Toprak is a journalist, essayist and author born 1987 in Germany with Anatolian roots. She writes mainly about identity, migration, Turkey, Hip Hop, feminism and beauty for German and Turkish media. She is a doctoral candidate at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität on Identity in Political Theory.
Further, she has started the blog “No Friends but the Mountains” on Substack writing about migration, identity, love and beauty.
She has studied Political Science at TU Darmstadt as well as Conflict Resolution Studies at Sabanci University in Istanbul, completed her MA Program in Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King´s College London with a thesis on Violence against Women in Turkey. Her career has brought her to Istanbul from beginning of 2013 to the end of 2014, in working as a communication manager and journalist as well as author for German media.
Medium Magazin ranked her 10th in the “Culture” category as Journalist of the Year in 2018 with the following words: “She aims directly at the heart of the discourses of the so-called German majority society. And she exposes the racisms as well as the contradictions in integration, migration, and minority policies.”
Cigdem Toprak conducted interviews with former German president Joachim Gauck, Marina Abramović, Francis Fukayama, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Zülfü Livaneli, Regina Halmich, Günter Wallraff, Ece Temelkuran, Thilo Sarrazin, Ezhel, Samra and Amber Pinkerton.
In 2023 she was member of the external board of trustees of the exhibition “Solingen ´93” of the Center for Persecuted Arts with Cem Özdemir as chairman. Furthermore, she was a mentor for TLNT & TLNT e.V. – Creative Mentoring Programs in 2023.
She published her first book „Das ist auch unser Land!“ in October 2020 and her short story “Mazlum” was published in “Krachkultur” in 2021. Further, she was student of Mario Levis Writing Studio in Creative Writing.
Her contributions have been published in Die WELT, Die WELT am SONNTAG, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, FAZ Magazin, FAZ Woche, ZEIT Online, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Business Insider, Die Presse, Tagesspiegel, Based Istanbul, Aposto, Jüdische Allgemeine and more.