Novelist Elif Shafak: ‘Turkey deserves democracy'

Telegraph

29-03-2025

The tea is served in sweet glasses with pinched waists, the walnut baklava, deliciously sticky, on a patterned plate. I'm with Elif Shafak in White­­­chapel, east London – Mehmet Efendi, the Turkish café going strong here since the 1950s, seemed the perfect venue for our conversation. Shafak, who was born in Strasbourg to Turkish parents, moved to Ankara when they separated and was raised there by her mother and grandmother. She would later become a global citizen, teaching in Massachusetts, Michigan and Arizona before settling in London in the early years of this century.
Over the past two decades, since she began writing and publishing in English, Shafak has become one of Britain's most popular novelists. Her books – which include Forty Rules of Love (2009), named by the BBC as one of the 100 works that have shaped the world, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – straddle eastern and western traditions of narrative, crossing the boundaries between earth and spirit, magic and reality. She calls herself a storyteller and believes in the power of stories to change us. But in this jaded age, can this really hold true?
Shafak smiles at my question. She is tall and elegant, her English accented by her heritage and her travels. 'I can tell you how stories changed me,' she says. 'My own childhood was so limited. I felt so suffocated, living in a patriarchal, very conservative neighbourhood in Ankara: stories showed me there were other ways to exist, that there are other worlds, other possibilities. I had zero social skills – and literature guided me, connected me.' She opens her palms, a welcoming gesture. 'I'm hoping it made me a better person.'
Shafak's narratives, despite their often heartwarming themes of love and connection, also take on challenging topics, and address the concerns of marginalised communities. In The Island of Missing Trees (2021), she sets a Romeo and Juliet story on a divided Cyprus, when Kostas, Greek and Christian, falls in love with Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim. In 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds… a sex worker lies dying in a rubbish bin on the outskirts of Istanbul – in her last moments of consciousness we witness her life unfold. And in The Bastard of Istanbul, she connects the members of a family via their links to what is often seen as the first historical genocide, when the Armenian Christian population was wiped out by the forces of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16.
That novel's publication in 2006 saw her charged under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which criminalises the 'public denigration' of Turkishness; she was by no means the only writer to be so accused, but her case became a symbol of the authoritarian democracy – an oxymoron which seems more and more useful these days – of then-prime minister, now president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She was acquitted in September of that year, but the wounds remain.
'It was the first time a work of ­fiction was put on trial in this way, and it was a very unsettling, unnerving time in my life,' she says. 'This went on for a year, and I was pregnant at the time. There were crowds on the street, tearing up my picture, calling me a traitor because my book touched upon the Armenian Genocide. I felt so alone.'
I wonder whether, knowing what she knows now, she would have done things differently – chosen safer subjects, perhaps. In 2019 Shafak learned that police had entered the premises of her Turkish publishing house and taken copies of her books to a prosecutor, who planned to search them for the 'crime of obscenity': 'This is because I write about issues like sexual violence and child brides – that's child abuse, not marriage,' she says.
'Does it worry me, these reactions? Of course it does. I'm an anxious person. But when I write a novel, I stay inside the novel, and my love for literature is so much deeper than my anxieties. These fictional characters become my friends, and then the book is born.'
The politics of Turkey are 'heartbreaking', she says. At the time of writing, the largest political protests in more than a decade have erupted, following the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul – President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief rival. The charges are corruption and supporting terrorism: Imamoglu denies them, and the masses appearing on the streets are calling for his release.
'Like millions of others, I find this very troubling, undemocratic, unfair and unacceptable,' Shafak says. 'Turkey is a beautiful country with beautiful people, a young and diverse population, who want a proper democracy. Turkey deserves and needs democracy, rule of law, respect for pluralism and human rights – definitely not authoritarianism.'
Shafak doesn't shrink from ­confronting darkness. Her latest novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, which follows the journey of a ­single drop of water across millennia, depicts the brutalisation of the Yazidi people; one of its characters contemplates suicide. And yet there is always a powerful vein of hope running through her fiction, a­­ ­quality that sometimes seems at odds with what one might call a more cynical British tradition.
'The cultural elite in this country is more accustomed to one particular way of storytelling, which is more Eurocentric,' she says evenly. 'I grew up with an oral storytelling tradition, which is more about ­circulation. It's like the 1001 Nights: you tell a story, then you open another box, you start telling another story, you open another box – but they're all connected. I worry that sometimes some critics in this country don't get it.
'The word 'intellectual' is not a positive concept in Britain, unfortunately,' Shafak continues, sipping her tea. 'People think it's a sign of arrogance. But that's not the French way, that's not the Russian way, that's not the Turkish way. I think an intellectual is someone who dedicates their life to ideas, words, thoughts, reading, and who cares about these subjects enough to try to bring them into the public space.'
That definition fits Shafak to a tee: and her many readers love her for it. But she believes that the instinct to consider the past seriously – to engage with it, to hear its stories – is in us all, if we choose to pay attention. 'When I first moved to this country I used to watch Antiques Roadshow,' she says with a warm smile. 'It's beautiful: you see how one small object actually can open up massive conversations, important, crucial conversations, connecting families, linked to history. So – this does exist in this country. And I love that.'