[2] He lived in Stockholm, Paris, Athens, and New York, where he met and collaborated with artists and intellectuals such as Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, and Peter Ustinov among others.

He quit this UNESCO post in 2016 to protest the Turkish State's damage to the historic Kurdish Old Town of Diyarbakir.

Yet, eventually, he started employing his current name, Zülfü Livaneli, which was what he used on his new album, Chants Révolutionnaires Turcs (Turkish Revolutionary songs).

He has produced albums and performed with Mikis Theodorakis and Maria Farantouri, and he has also collaborated with Manos Hatzidakis, Giora Feidman, Inti-Illimani and Ángel Parra.

In the 1994 Turkish local elections, he was nominated as candidate for mayorship of Istanbul by the Social Democratic Populist Party, but his bid failed.

During his political career in Ankara, Livaneli presented a legislative proposal for amending Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

Besides this, in 2006 he presented a proposal to the National Assembly that a commission be established to investigate the reasons for increasing violence and fanaticism among the youth.

Following his 2005 resignation from the party membership, Livaneli continued in his position in the Grand National Assembly as an independent until the end of that term.

Livaneli directed four feature films: Iron Earth, Copper Sky, Mist, Shahmaran and Veda.

[14] Veda that based on the life of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the last film written and directed by Zülfü Livaneli.

Published in 1978, his first collection of short stories A Child in Purgatory was turned into a movie by Swedish and German TV.

Livaneli is known for his novels that interweave diverse social and historical backgrounds, figures, and incidents, such as in Bliss which won the Barnes & Noble's Discovery of Great New Writers Award in 2006,[15] and in his Serenade for Nadia, Leyla's House, and My Brother's Story, which were all translated into 37 languages and won numerous Turkish and International literary awards.