Ebru Gündeş (born 12 October 1974 in İstanbul) is a Turkish pop folk singer.

Early life
Ebru Gündeş went to primary school in Ankara. Moving back to İstanbul with her family afterwards, she had to discontinue her education due to financial hardship.

The quality of her voice was discovered at an early age when one of her relatives took her to Neşe Demirkat, a partner of Raks Neşe Müzik a record label in Turkey. Neşe Demirkat was impressed with her voice and introduced her to music producers Koral Sarıtaş and Selçuk Tekay. [1]

Career
Ebru Gündeş sings the kind of desperately tragic arabesk love songs that are the core of Turkish popular music. Besides Turkey, she is especially popular in Iran where she was voted among one of the favourite singers.

Her debut album, Tanrı Misafiri, was released in 1992. It proved to be a massive success and sold 1,250,000 copies. At this stage she was a very sweet and innocent-looking girl, slim, dressed in white and with an attractive way of raising one eyebrow. She was on billboards all over Istanbul. Coming as she did from one of Istanbul's less affluent districts, with a rough manner and speaking voice in contrast to her beautiful singing voice, she garnered lots of public support. Her subsequent albums have been hugely successful and are listed below.