Banu Gürsaler Syvertsen was born in 1956 in İzmir. After graduating from the Sociology graduate program at Boğaziçi University, she moved to Norway in 1981 to continue her education in Oslo. She worked for the Norwegian Radio and Television Corporation for 25 years as a producer and presenter of news, culture and children's programs on radio, TV and later on web pages. She worked in various cultural projects, prepared the radio program "Hello" with 16 serials aimed at teaching Turkish, translated two works by Nâzım Hikmet and Sevim Burak and adapted them for television and the stage. She has been translating from Norwegian to Turkish since 1991.