Neşe Yaşın, pronounced Neshe Yashun (born 1959) is a well known Cypriot Turkish poet and author.
Yaşın was born in 1959 to Turkish Cypriot parents. Her father is the accomplished poet and author Özker Yaşın and she is the sister of the award winning poet Mehmet Yaşın.
Yaşın completed her university education at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara where she read sociology. Yaşın currently teaches at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia at the Department of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies.
Since mid 1980s she has been living and working in south Nicosia. She has been an active peace activist from a very young age and member of the Cyprus Conflict Resolution Trainers Group, which in 1995 proposed 15 projects to promote peace and reconciliation on the island and presented in the Cyprus Peace Bazaar. Yaşın mainly writes in Turkish although a considerable number of her works of prose have been translated into Greek and English. She has written poetry as well as articles that have been published by both Turkish and Greek language papers in both ethinic Greek and ethnic Turkish communities and all over the island of Cyprus.
Yaşın frequently writes and presents papers on peace and reunification of her "beloved island" Cyprus. One such paper that gathered attention was the one presented at World Conference on Culture in Stockholm in 1998. She has also provided fora for various Turkish speaking women's support groups.
In 2002 her novel Secret History of Sad Girls was banned in the TRNC and Turkey and she received multiple threats from Turkish nationalists.[1][2]
In 2006 she made history in Cyprus when she ran for a position in the parliament of Cyprus . She became the first Turkish Cypriot to participate in elections since the departure of the Turkish Cypriot candidates in 1963.[3]
Which Half, Nicosia, Thegona, 1995.
Üzgün Kızların Gizli Tarihi (The Secret History of the Sad Girls), 2002, İletişim Yayınları, Istanbul ISBN 9750500962
Ay Aşktan Yapılmıştır (The Moon Is Made of Love), 2001, Gendaş Kültür, Istanbul, ISBN 9753083009