Zehra Doğan

Biography

The sentence of 2 March 2017 was handed down in part because of a painting. It showed a destroyed Nusaybin, a town in southeastern Turkey where clashes between the security forces and fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party took place in 2016. Turkish flags are hung over the ruins in the picture. Doğan wrote on Twitter that she had received her sentence only for those flags on destroyed buildings.

She was born in 1989 in Diyarbakır, in the Bağlar district, into a Kurdish family. In childhood the family travelled for seasonal work to Manisa, İzmir and the Black Sea coast; after school she sold water, sweets, parsley and second-hand books, and shined shoes. From the age of eleven she studied drawing at the Dicle Fırat Cultural Centre. At eighteen she began studying fashion design at Munzur University, and then graduated from the art teaching department of Dicle University.

She came to journalism early. The agency Jinha, founded in 2012, was staffed entirely by women, and Doğan became one of its editors, the last one before it was closed. In 2012, together with Hazal Peker, she received a special jury prize of the Musa Anter award for reports on Rojava, and in 2015 the Metin Göktepe Journalism Award for a piece on Yazidi women who had escaped captivity by the so-called Islamic State.

In February 2016 she moved to Nusaybin and reported from there. On 21 July she was detained in a café, and on 23 July she was imprisoned in Mardin. On 29 October 2016 the authorities closed Jinha, along with more than a hundred other media outlets shut down after the failed coup attempt in July. On 9 December she was released pending trial. On 2 March 2017 the court acquitted her of the charge of membership in an illegal organisation but found her guilty of “terrorist propaganda”. Her appeal was rejected, and in the summer of 2017 she was arrested again. She was held first in Diyarbakır, and in October 2018 she was transferred to Tarsus.

In prison she and other inmates produced a newspaper, Özgür Gündem Zindan; the title plays on the name of the Istanbul Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem. She drew with whatever was at hand, and the works were smuggled out. They were shown in Europe, and a campaign in her support grew up around these exhibitions.

In November 2017 Ai Weiwei wrote her a letter, comparing the pressure on artists in China and Turkey; Doğan replied that art is the best instrument for the struggle. On 16 March 2018 Banksy unveiled a mural in New York about 21 metres long: black tally marks for the days of her imprisonment, one group of which turns into bars, with Doğan's face looking out from behind them. In 2018 she received the Courage in Journalism Award of the International Women's Media Foundation and became an honorary member of PEN International.

She was released from prison on 24 February 2019. After her release she took part in exhibitions in London (the installation “Ê Li Dû Man” at Tate Modern, 2019), Brescia, New York and Paris, illustrated the album “Middle Eastern”, and published the graphic novel “Prison n°5” (2021). For it she received the Atomium Award, the Le Soir Prize for comic strip reportage. In 2020 she was given the Carol Rama Award at Artissima, and in 2024 the ColophonArte Prize.

On 19 October 2023 the Court of Cassation found that the trial court had erred in assessing the evidence and should have acquitted her. On 9 May 2024, at the retrial, Doğan was acquitted on all charges of “terrorist propaganda”: the court pointed to the lack of a legal basis for the accusations.