Elif Shafak
What are some of Elif Shafak’s notable works?
What themes does Elif Shafak explore in her novels?
What was the outcome of Elif Shafak’s trial in Turkey?
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She was branded a traitor for writing in a language that was not her own, faced with legal charges for “insulting Turkishness,” and denounced by Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s supporters. A widely praised writer with works translated into nearly 60 languages, she transcends boundaries, bridging cultures and stitching together the East and the West in her stories. She is Elif Shafak (also spelled Şafak)—the multilingual Turkish-British author who switches between Turkish and English in her writings with ease and proclaims herself a “bohemian anarcho pacifist post-feminist” in love with stories.
An itinerant life
- Birth date: October 25, 1971
- Birthplace: Strasbourg, France
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in international relations, master’s degree in gender and women’s studies, and Ph.D. in political science
- Teaching career: Shafak has taught in universities including Istanbul Bilgi University and Istanbul Bahcesehir University in Turkey; the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan in the United States, and St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in the United Kingdom.
- Occupation: Author
- Notable works: Mahrem (1999; The Gaze), Bit Palas (2002; The Flea Palace), The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), The Forty Rules of Love (2009), 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019), and There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024)
- Family: Married to Eyüp Can (journalist); mother of two children, Zelda and Zahir
Shafak’s early years were not conventional and were often unsettled and challenging, marked as they were, in Shafak’s words, with “migrations, ruptures and displacements.” Born in Strasbourg, France, to Turkish parents—father Nuri Bilgin and mother Şafak Atayman—she has few memories of her father as the couple separated when she was a baby. While Bilgin stayed in Strasbourg and eventually remarried, Atayman returned with Shafak to her mother’s home in Ankara, Turkey. Atayman, who had left university when she married, went back to her education, entrusting Shafak mainly to her mother’s care while she completed her graduation, building a career as a diplomat in the years to come.
In an essentially patriarchal Turkish society, Shafak grew up in a household led solely by women. Her grandmother was spiritual, religious, and conventional, preaching to Shafak about a kind, feminine God. She was also strong and progressive, asking Shafak’s mother to focus on her career rather than contemplating remarriage. Shafak recalls visiting her paternal grandmother, too, at Izmir, whose vision of God as a masculine entity to be feared differed radically from the version that her maternal grandmother taught her. The grandmothers’ outlooks introduced Shafak to faith and helped her discover different approaches and find her own interpretations of it. Growing up around them and her single mother made Shafak sensitive to gender dynamics and discrimination, as did her awareness that theirs was not a typical family setup.
However, Shafak never felt quite at home in the traditional Ankara neighborhood or at school and spent most of her time reading and writing. When her mother was posted in Madrid on a diplomatic assignment, Shafak moved with her, in 1980. Struggling yet again to fit into her new surroundings, she threw herself into books. In interviews she has recalled that reading Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a teenager was a turning point in her life that inspired her to write.
Shafak’s strained relationship with her largely absentee father led her to drop his surname (Bilgin) from her own. When she was about 17, just before a magazine published one of her short stories, she replaced her father’s surname with her mother’s first name.
Shafak would not stay rooted in one city. Her mother’s work took them to Jordan and Germany, and later Shafak lived in Michigan, Boston, and Arizona in the United States. Between these moves, she returned to Turkey several times and lived in Istanbul, and she eventually settled in London, a decision partly shaped by the political and social climate of Istanbul and her trial in Turkey over her novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2006).
Novels
“If there is sadness, melancholy, longing in my work, I find it easier to express them in Turkish. If there is humour, satire, irony, I find it much easier to voice them in English.” —Elif Shafak, 2019
Beginnings
Shafak’s first published work is the short story collection Kem gözlere Anadolu (1994; “Anatolia to Evil Eyes”), which delves into a rich tradition of myths. Since then, the author has explored a variety of themes in her novels and nonfiction, including gender issues, cultural politics, immigration, human rights, environmental matters, religion, history, and philosophy, with Istanbul featuring prominently in a number of her stories. Her debut novel, Pinhan (“The Hidden”), which appeared in 1997, probes gender issues as it follows an androgynous mystic searching for his identity in a rigid society. In her next work, Şehrin aynaları (1999; “Mirrors of the City”), Shafak looks at love as well as Jewish and Islamic traditions against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. Mahrem (1999; The Gaze), which would be the first of Shafak’s novels to be translated into English, brought her into prominence. The story reflects on appearances and the power of perception, revolving around an overweight woman and a dwarf who attract relentless stares wherever they go. Among the novels set in Istanbul is Bit palas (2002; The Flea Palace). It presents a tapestry of intersecting lives through characters from diverse backgrounds, mostly migrants, living in a crumbling palace built by an immigrant Russian noble.
Troubled times
In 2004 Shafak published her first English novel, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, with immigration and alienation at its heart. Already facing criticism for changing the language of her writing and incorporating Ottoman-era words in her works, Shafak found herself swept into a bigger storm when The Bastard of Istanbul came out in 2006. The novel addresses the legacy of the Armenian Genocide. This campaign of deportation and mass killing was conducted against the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turk government during World War I (1914–18)—an event that the Turkish government denies responsibility for and refuses to acknowledge as a genocide. This provoked sharp public and governmental backlash, leading to Shafak’s trial under the Turkish penal code’s Article 301 for denigrating Turkishness. She faced a possible prison term of up to three years but was ultimately acquitted.
Later that year Shafak faced a more intimate struggle. After years of prolific output, she experienced a slowdown when she and her husband, Eyüp Can, welcomed their first child in 2006. New to motherhood, Shafak had to shift gears while contending with postpartum depression. This experience led to her memoir Siyah Süt (2007; Black Milk), which reflects on that transitional period and her journey toward rediscovering her creative rhythm.
Carrying on
- Rumi Prize in 1998 for Pinhan
- Union of Turkish Writers’ Best Novel Prize in 2000 for Mahrem
- French Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2010
- Global Thinkers Forum (GTF) Award for Excellence in Promoting Gender Equality in 2016
- British Academy President’s Medal in 2024
Overcoming personal predicaments, Shafak regained her momentum, and The Forty Rules of Love (2009) not only became an international bestseller but also was included by the BBC in its list of 100 novels that shaped the world. The story takes readers on a journey through Sufism, spirituality, and love by weaving together parallel narratives—one following the Sufi mystic Shams of Tabriz and his relationship with the scholar Rumi, and the other centering on a Jewish woman, Ella, who encounters their story from a manuscript. This was followed by novels including Honour (2012), which tackles the stark theme of violence inflicted on women, and The Three Daughters of Eve (2016), which focuses on three women described as “the Sinner, the Believer and the Confused,” with the protagonist navigating a web of secularism and Islamic religiosity in her life.
Short-listed for the Booker Prize, Shafak’s 2019 masterpiece, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, is a tale spun around a murdered sex worker and other marginalized characters including a transgender woman and a woman with dwarfism. Her later novels, The Island of Missing Trees (2021) and There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024), turn toward environmental themes, exploring loss, memory, and the fragile ties between humans and the natural world, with a tree and a drop of water serving as connective threads in the two works, respectively. Shafak has come under both public and official scrutiny for her writings, but she remains one of the most influential voices of her generation, advocating for freedom of speech, minority rights, women’s rights, and more. She became the president of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025.