Özdamar's art is distinctive in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Germany and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both.

A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin.

[3] Özdamar still wanted to become an actress, so she went back to Istanbul after two years, where she started to take acting lessons and got her first big roles in theatre productions.

Due to this coup, in 1976 Özdamar moved back to Germany and fell in love with the German language and authors like Bertolt Brecht.

[4] While touring with a play she also lived in France for another two years, before coming back to Germany and working at a theatre in Bochum in 1979.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar's first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanserai : Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other), published in 1992, earned her the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize (1991) for single chapters from the novel.

[9] After that, in 2001, Özdamar publishes another short story collection, Der Hof im Spiegel (The Courtyard in the Mirror).

[10] Her novel, 2003, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare at the Earth), describes Özdamar's time working at the Volksbühne theatre in East-Berlin.

In 2021, Özdamar published the novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum to much critical acclaim, with RBB Kultur reporter Katharina Döbler describing it as "magnificent"[11] and it landing on the shortlist for the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

[13] The train between Germany and Turkey, between Europe and Asia is the landscape, which closely describes the life and the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

In her most autobiographical texts, Özdamar takes the reader with her on these train journeys between two worlds, where one can experience the complexity of feelings and impressions that come with migration, with moving to a new space, returning to the old, and finding oneself in-between strangeness and familiarity.

Einer ist Gast und sitzt da, der andere arbeitet" (I love the word guest-worker, I always see two people in front of me.

[13] Early scholarship often looked at Özdamar's work through a sociological lens focusing on language, identity and life writing.

In the 2000s, Özdamar's work was more closely interlinked with postcolonial theory and accentuated her dealing with memory, translation and intertextuality.

Later perspectives through which Özdamar's work was reflected on take on a more philosophical and aesthetic form and bring her in conversation with thinkers and artists such as Deleuze and Guattari or the early Surrealists.

[13] One of Özdamar's identifiers is her unique language, which she created partially through a literal translation of Turkish expressions or catchwords, through playing with philosophical and literary quotations, and the Broken German used by the guest workers.

[13] Her interests were already present before her initial period in Germany, but was only further solidified through an encounter with a left-wing Turkish director in Berlin, Vasif Öngören.

[13] Özdamar's connection to theatre persisted into the 1980s with a certain period spent as director's assistant and actress at Claus Peymann's Bochumer Ensemble in West Germany.