Gisela Kraft  Gisela Kraft (28 June 1936 - 5 January 2010) was a German author and poet. She also undertook extensive work as a literary translator from Turkish to German. Gisela Kraft formed her own judgements and lived by them. One adjective that repeatedly appears in sources describing her is "idiosyncratic". Gisela Kraft was born in Berlin, where she grew up during the war years. Between 1956 and 1959 she undertook a training in Theatre and Eurythmy in Berlin, Stuttgart and Dornach. Between 1960 and 1972 she engaged in a succession of theatre jobs. An abrupt change came in 1972 when she enrolled at the Free University in West Berlin and embarked on a degree course in Islamic studies. Six years later, in 1978, she received her doctorate with a dissertation (subsequently published) on the Turkish poet Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca. She stayed on at the Free University as an academic researcher at the Institute for Islamic studies from 1978 till 1983. During the early 1980s Kraft was chair of the "Neue Gesellschaft für Literatur" (""New Society for Literature"") in West Berlin which she co-founded. She was also actively involved, within the wider Peace movement, in the "Artists for Peace" (""Künstler für den Frieden"") initiative. A committed socialist, in November 1984 Kraft relocated from the west to East Berlin. In the west she had found herself under attack from Turkish leftwing intellectuals because she had dared to translate Nâzım Hikmet's Bedreddin Epic. In the east she was offered a permanent translating job with a major publisher. It was unusual for West Germans to emigrate permanently to East Germany at this time: in a posthumously published memoir entitled "Mein Land, ein anderes" ("loosely "My country, a different way"") Kraft would recall in comic detail the difficulty the East German frontier official checking her papers had in accepting that she had no plans to "return home" to the west. She lived, sometimes critical but generally happily in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) for the next six years. In the east she was able to support herself as a poet in a way that would have been more difficult or impossible in the west, and she quickly developed a network of close friends, although perhaps her most constant companion during this period was her overindulged cat, Sofia (""Söfchen""), a present from the poet Hinnerk Einhorn after the death of her "western" cat, Leila, shortly after the crossing to the east : one of the most important services a friend could provide was to look after the cat when Kraft had to be away from home overnight for a poetry reading.