Fatih AkinFatih Akin is an award-winning Turkish-German film director. In 2007, his film The Edge of Heaven won the prize for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and was later awarded a prize by the European Parliament. The film is a cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning, and forgiveness. In Akin's cinema, the lives of German Turks is a recurring theme, especially their struggles and confusion between two different cultures. He also directed "Head-On" and "In July" as well as the festival hit documentary, "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk is one of Turkey's most prominent novelists. He also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Orhan PamukProfessor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing. His work has sold over seven million books in more than fifty languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature-the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Turkish citizen. Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a wealthy yet declining bourgeois family; an experience he describes in passing in his novels The Black Book, as well as more thoroughly in his personal memoir Istanbul. From ages 22 to 30, Pamuk lived with his mother, writing his first novel and attempting to find a publisher. He describes himself as a cultural Muslim.

Elif ShafakElif Shafak is one of the most outspoken women of Turkey and author of the controversial novel, The Bastard of Istanbul. Born in Strasbourg, France in 1971, she spent her teenage years in Spain before returning to Turkey. She has published five novels including The Saint of Incipient Insanities. Shafak is also a social scientist, graduated from International Relations at Middle East Technical University. She holds a Master of Science degree in Gender and Women Studies, and earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science. Shafak's academic background has been nurtured by a critical, interdisciplinary, and gender-conscious rereading of the literature on the Middle East & West, Islam, and modernity.