Marta Ottaviani is a freelance journalist and analyst, focused on Turkey and Greece. She lived eight years in Istanbul and contributes to high profile Italian dailies La Stampa, Avvenire, Aspenia, the Aspen Institute Italia prestigious journal on international affairs and the Italian think-tank ISPI. She is regularly invited as an expert on Italian media, both on radio and television. These include for example Radio Tre Mondo, Radio 24 and TV programmes Omnibus (La7) and Radio Svizzera Italiana. Her first two books were published in 2008 and 2010. During the years she spent in Turkey, she travelled across the whole country, but above all she observed the political scene and the society changing day by day. She has been the direct witness of the ascent of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his authoritarian involution. She decided to capture what she had observed in Turkey in the past years in her latest book Il Reìs. Come Erdoğan ha cambiato la Turchia (The Reìs. How Erdoğan changed Turkey, 2016). In this book, Marta Ottaviani explains how Turkish internal and external policies changed, describing how this affected the local society and increasingly distanced the country from the European Union. The book has won several prizes, including the prestigious Premio Fiuggi Storia.

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