Sibel Redžep

Sibel Redžep, who records simply as Sibel, is a Swedish pop singer and songwriter. She was born on 12 December 1987 in Radoviš, in the south-east of North Macedonia, into a Turkish family from the nearby village of Topolnica. She later lived in Kristianstad in southern Sweden, and she speaks Swedish, Turkish, Macedonian, English and French.

She first tried Sweden's Idol in 2004, at sixteen, and moved the usually stern judge Peter Swartling to tears with Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful". That year she stopped in the semi-finals, but in Idol 2005 she went all the way to the penultimate round and finished third, behind Agnes Carlsson and Sebastian Karlsson.

Swartling kept his word and became part of her management. In the summer of 2006 they went into the studio in Dublin with the songwriter and producer Christian Antblad and settled on big ballads for her voice. One of them, "How I Tried to Let You Go", began as a chorus she sang to them over the phone. With some thirty songs recorded, she went home to Kristianstad to finish school.

In 2008 she sang Antblad's "That Is Where I'll Go" at Melodifestivalen. It reached the final through the second-chance round, where Charlotte Perrelli won. Released on 5 March 2008, the single spent nine weeks on the Swedish chart and peaked at number six. Her album The Diving Belle followed a week later and reached number nine. The second single, "Make Believe", was tied to the Ronald McDonald foundation in Sweden, for which she was an ambassador.

Sibel returned to Melodifestivalen in 2010 with "Stop", written by Mikaela Stenström and Dimitri Stassos; it placed seventh in its semi-final and reached number 27 as a single. The same year she recorded "Our Generation" for the soundtrack of the Disney Channel series Shake It Up.

She is a songwriter signed to BMG after several years at Warner Chappell, and since 2014 she has mostly written songs for other artists, dividing her time between Stockholm and Los Angeles. Her voice can be heard in the backing vocals of Ariana Grande's "Into You", "Love Me Harder" and "Bad Decisions", Carly Rae Jepsen's "Run Away with Me" and Ashley Tisdale's "It's Alright, It's OK".