Alev Scott was born in London to a Turkish mother and a British father. After graduating in classics from Oxford in 2009 she worked in London as an assistant director in theater and opera before moving to Istanbul in January 2011, where she now works as a freelance journalist for the British press. She is the author of Turkish Awakening: A Personal Discovery of Modern Turkey (Faber&Faber, 2014), and is currently writing a book that retraces the lost communities of the Ottoman Empire.