For a long time Elif Shafak was referred to as Turkey’s “most widely read female author”. Today, she is surely simply its best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel prize in literature, but it is Shafak whose novels are fervently passed among readers. There Are Rivers in the Sky, which follows a single raindrop from ancient Nineveh to the River Tigris in 2018, was one of the UK’s bestselling literary novels last year. The Island of Missing Trees, a love story set in post-colonial Cyprus and contemporary London, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize in 2022, and 10 Minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World, narrated by a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2019. Last December she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature. It would be tempting to say she is on a roll, but Shafak’s reputation and readership have been steadily growing for more than 20 years and spanning as many books, of which 14 are novels.
In a 2017 Ted Talk, which has been viewed more than 6.4m times, she describes herself as an Istanbulite, “a European by birth and by choice” and a Londoner for many years. “I like to think of myself as a global soul, as a world citizen, a nomad and an itinerant storyteller.” Her novels sweep confidently across centuries and continents, taking in politics, history, feminism and ecology, typically with a dash of magic realism or mysticism.
Her latest, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, is a stylistically inventive fictionalised life of Gustave Flaubert. “This book is really my love letter to literature,” Shafak says over coffee in west London, where the 54-year-old author has lived with her husband and two children for the past 18 years. While Flaubert is now considered the godfather of the modern novel – as Nabokov said, without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust or James Joyce – most of his life was spent toiling in obscurity. It is this that interests Shafak. “The book is about a lonely boy who was misunderstood by almost everyone around him, including his own family members. He was regarded as a failure, as a disappointment, treated as ‘the other’.” The novel is dedicated to anyone who may have felt similarly treated. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘you’re my brother, you’re my sister’. That was the beginning,” she says.
Shafak talks with the same fluency and lyrical intensity as she writes, in long, far-reaching sentences. In person, she also listens intently and smiles often, despite the seriousness of her words. We last met when she was part of the panel to discuss the Guardian’s 100 best novels of all time list earlier this year: Madame Bovary was in her top 10, but, like Flaubert himself, she is a huge fan of Don Quixote. On stage, she had the softest voice, but when she speaks, everyone listens. She has recently enjoyed renewed popularity with younger readers on BookTok. It is no wonder there are snaking queues of readers of all ages and nationalities for the signings after her literary events.
In One Brief Moment All Eternity arose out of our own historical moment, which Shafak has dubbed “The age of three As: Angst, Anger and AI”. Yet it also started from “a very personal place”, she says, when she was struggling with depression and anxiety, or hüzün in Turkish, meaning a deep melancholy. “In the middle of a world shaped by wars and violence, division, climate crisis, technological uncertainties, you find yourself asking, ‘What is the meaning of shutting yourself in a small room and worrying about the perfect synonym?’” she says. “Is there any value in writing a short story, a poem, a novel in a time of crisis and chaos, such as the one we’re going through? I wanted to take a closer look at this question – creativity in a time of crisis.”
This led her back to the 19th century, another era of change and confusion, in which “there lived a beloved novelist who dedicated his entire life to literature in a very passionate way”. While Flaubert set out to inhabit the female mind – then a radical proposition for a male novelist – Shafak upends the premise of Madame Bovary to tell his story through multiple women whose paths may have crossed with his. “I wanted to bring together the European canon of the novel with the Middle Eastern oral tradition of storytelling,” she explains. “You open a box and inside there’s another box, under this story, there’s another story. There’s a polyphony of voices.”
And so Flaubert’s life is told not just through the eyes of his beloved nursemaid, Julie; his maman; his long-term mistress, Louise Colet; and his confidant George Sand, but also an acrobat he encounters as a boy, a camel called Jamilah and Emma Bovary herself. We meet an Egyptian dancer and courtesan, Kuchuck Hanem, with whom Flaubert becomes enraptured on his travels in the Middle East, passingly mentioned in biographies. “I wanted to remember this woman and say, ‘Maybe this is the woman who inspired Madame Bovary,’” Shafak says. “I want to claim that at the heart of this iconic French European literary heroine, there is an Egyptian belly dancer.” Opium, syphilis and Istanbul (Shafak always thinks of the city as “she”) are also given their own chapters.
“Every time I start writing a book, I say to myself, ‘This time I’m going to keep it minimalist,’” she laughs. “I think because of who I am, my upbringing, all these cultural influences are like tributaries that flow into it. We are all interconnected, not only with each other as fellow human beings, but with nature. For me, the long narrative form is about honouring those connections.”
They may be separated by nearly two centuries, by nationality and by gender, but once she started looking, the connections between Flaubert’s story and her own were striking, “starting with that lonely childhood, with that feeling of being the other,” she says.
Although her parents were Turkish, Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971, where her father was studying for a PhD. Her parents divorced five years later and the young Elif and her mother returned to live with her maternal grandmother in Ankara. Like Flaubert, Shafak grew up with two maternal figures. Although her grandmother was uneducated, she insisted her mother return to university, which she had left when she married. Shafak called her mother “big sister”, her grandmother “mother”: “From one I got my love for written culture, from the other I got my love for oral storytelling,” she says. She remembers her grandmother’s flat as a place full of magic, lefty students and Gauloises cigarette smoke.
For all the love in her childhood, Shafak felt abandoned by her father, an academic who remarried. Like the celebrated Doctor Flaubert, Gustave’s father, he was “very detached, very aloof”. She didn’t see him for most of her childhood, and for a long time was very angry that he was such a good father to her half-brothers. “I felt like I was the forgotten child. There was a void. There was an absence of love,” she says. “And I think absences also shape us. Silences also shape us.”
After she finally graduated, her mother became a teacher and then a diplomat. When Shafak was 10, they moved to Madrid, where she was the only Turkish pupil in the international school. As a teenager, she lived in Jordan and Germany. “Throughout all those years when I was really very lonely, books were my friends.” Shafak returned to Ankara to take a degree in international relations, followed by a PhD in political science. In her 20s, after teaching in Istanbul, she “escaped” to study in the US. Her first novel, Pinhan (The Sufi), was met with acclaim when it was published in Turkey in 1997. But her decision to write her fifth novel, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, in English was considered a betrayal by many at home.
The most significant parallel between Flaubert and Shafak is that they have both had their work put on trial: Madame Bovary for obscenity charges in 1857 and Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul in 2006, for “the public denigration” of Turkishness, due to her having written about the Armenian genocide. Shafak had to live with a bodyguard for a year and a half. Her picture was burned and spat on. She was acquitted, but in 2019 her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was investigated by Turkish authorities for “crimes of obscenity” along with two earlier books, The Gaze and Three Daughters of Eve, which dealt with material such as child brides and sexual harassment. Her husband, Eyüp Can, a Turkish journalist and former editor of the Turkish liberal newspaper, Radikal, was put on a wanted list as part of President Erdoğan’s crackdown on intellectuals after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016.
She has described being a writer in Turkey as “a bit like being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other”, with the kiss from the readers and the slap from the government. She is keen to stress how much her books are loved back home. “In countries like Turkey, a book is not a personal item. If you like a novel, you can’t just put it back on the shelf. You give it to your auntie, the auntie gives it to her neighbour. It’s incredibly heartwarming.”
But she again found herself at the centre of a storm back home after her 2017 Ted talk, titled “The revolutionary power of diverse thought”, in which she came out as bisexual. “I don’t know if it’s brave,” she says now. “I wish I could have done it before. But the abuse that I received from my own motherland for weeks uninterrupted was quite, quite bruising.”
She hasn’t been back to Turkey for 11 years. “There’s a melancholy to it. Maybe I’m in self-imposed exile,” she says. “But as a writer, I need freedom. I need the freedom of imagination, the freedom of speech. I felt like I first migrated into the English language and then into the UK. London became home. And I now feel rooted here, and I say this as someone who has led a very nomadic life.”
Her daughter and son, who have just left home for the new university term, have grown up speaking English. Her elderly mother often stays with them for long periods. “I hope I’m not offending, but I think only a few male authors above a certain age have precise writing schedules,” she says wryly. “Everyone else just juggles multiple roles.” She often writes at night, while listening to heavy metal, melodic death metal in particular, on her headphones. She plays the same song on a loop, often 80 or 90 times. She is a fan of the Armenian-American band System of a Down, who have also been very vocal about the Armenian genocide. “I love it. It gives me such energy,” she says. And somehow this makes her fiction “calmer”.
But it doesn’t make her calm. Writing doesn’t come any easier as you get older, she says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first book, fifth book, tenth book, you suffer. You sit at your desk and there’s a lot of self-doubt. There’s a lot of anxiety, panic attacks. That, too, is part of the creative process.” When she is finished, she is not filled with satisfaction or pride, but grief. “I feel a sense of loss,” she says. “I find it so difficult to let go of the characters.”
Then she goes back out into the world. She thinks it is really important for women to have a voice in public life, and surprises herself by how much she loves literary festivals. “I really am an introvert by nature, so my natural habitat is just a small room full of books,” she says. “But when I’m on stage doing a literary event, it is not a chore. It’s not a burden. It is an immense treat for the mind or the soul.” As someone for whom speaking out has led to threats of imprisonment, she is frustrated by the cynicism towards intellectualism in the UK and the US. “It’s regarded as a sign of arrogance, hubris,” she says. “I’m not claiming to be an intellectual. What I am claiming is I have a lot of respect for the intellect.”
For Shafak, literature is “one of our last remaining democratic spaces where we’re not rushing from one thing to the next, we’re not just being fed snippets of information, but we slow down and we listen to each other again,” she says. “The ancient art of storytelling is so universal. It’s so timeless. It really doesn’t belong to a single ethnicity, region or religion. It belongs to all humanity. When I’m writing and in my books, I try to remember that kind of … ” For a moment she is lost for words. “I don’t know what to call it other than shared humanity.”
