Ebru Gündeş

Ebru Gündeş
Promotional photo for the album Kaçak
Background information
Born	(1974-10-12) 12 October 1974 (age 42) Istanbul, Turkey
Genres	Turkish pop
Occupation(s)	Singer, TV show host, actress
Years active	1992–present
Labels	Istanbul Plak, Erol Köse

Ebru Gündeş (Turkish pronunciation: [ebˈɾu ɟynˈdeʃ], born 12 October 1974, in İstanbul) is a Turkish pop-folk singer, actress, and television personality.

Ebru Gündeş was born in İstanbul. She attended primary school in Ankara, but she was forced to discontinue her education due to financial difficulty.

The quality of her voice was discovered at an early age when one of her relatives took her to Neşe Demirkat, a partner in Raks Neşe Müzik, which is a record label in Turkey. Demirkat was impressed with her voice and introduced her to music producers Koral Sarıtaş and Selçuk Tekay.

Ebru Gündeş sings the kind of desperately tragic Arabesque (Arabesk) love songs that are the core of Turkish pop music. Aside from Turkey, she is particularly popular in Iran, because of the substantial Turkic minority in the country. Consequently, she is considered to be one of Iran's favourite singers. She is also very popular in Azerbaijan republic

Her debut album, Tanrı Misafiri, was released in 1992. It proved to be a massive success, selling 1,250,000 copies nationwide. At this stage, she was regarded as a very sweet and innocent-looking girl, slim, dressed in white and with an attractive habit of raising one eyebrow. She was on billboards all over Istanbul. Her subsequent albums have been hugely successful.

She has had serious health problems. She suffered from a cerebral haemorrhage in December 1999, while recording Dön Ne Olur. After two operations, Ebru eventually returned to full health. Dön Ne Olur was one of the best-selling albums of all time in Turkey. In November 2001, she released the album Ahdım Olsun. This album embodied the pain of the experiences she endured from December 1999 to November 2001.