Latest news with #Shafak
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In brief: The Homemade God; Mythica; There Are Rivers in the Sky
Rachel JoyceDoubleday, £20, pp384 When commercially successful but critically derided artist Vic Kemp dies suddenly, his four adult children are left reeling. Vic's recent marriage to a much younger woman – the elusive Bella-Mae – fuels speculation about his death and the whereabouts of his final painting. As the children gather at Vic's Italian villa, tensions rise and long-buried truths can no longer be ignored. Joyce employs her considerable emotional acuity and deft characterisation to portray the complexities of sibling relationships and the burden of patriarchal dominance in a masterly and deeply satisfying exploration of art, grief and familial bonds. Emily HauserDoubleday, £25, pp496 Hauser's fascinating book goes in search of the women who inspired characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey, from Helen and Hecuba to Cassandra and Calypso. Blending archaeology, literature, history and myth, she surveys bronze age evidence to uncover clues as to the identities and often surprising biographies of historical figures who have been largely ignored by classical scholarship. Elif ShafakPenguin, £9.99, pp496 (paperback) Shafak's latest multi-perspective novel travels from 19th-century London to 2018, from the Thames to the Tigris, with protagonists including a poverty-stricken young prodigy, a girl who is going deaf, and a hydrologist who has fled her marriage. As these narratives converge, Shafak poses questions about identity, inequality and the significance of water in our lives. To order The Homemade God, Mythica or There Are Rivers in the Sky go to Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Novelist Elif Shafak: ‘Turkey deserves democracy'
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.'
Sky News
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Author Elif Shafak, once put on trial for 'insulting Turkishness', warns of crackdown on free speech
"When history takes a darker turn, it always starts with the omission of words." Award-winning Turkish author Elif Shafak sat down with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim on The World podcast to talk about her latest novel There Are Rivers In The Sky, the parallels she sees between Turkey and America, and what it was like being on trial for "insulting Turkishness". In 2006, Elif Shafak's fictional characters from her bestselling novel The Bastard Of Istanbul were put on trial in a Turkish courtroom. It was the first time ever a Turkish author had been accused of "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the country's law. The novel outraged many nationalists for its featuring of the Armenian Genocide, which Shafak says "is still one of the biggest taboos in Turkey" today. Street mobs burned and spat on pictures of her, torched EU flags in the streets, and called her a traitor. She was acquitted but relocated to London after the "scary" and "unsettling" episode. Nineteen years later and Shafak is worried that this crackdown on free speech is being replicated across the West. Notably, for her, she sees the echoes in America. "When history takes a darker turn, it always starts with the omission of words," Shafak warns. She points to the book bans across the United States - PEN America has counted more than 10,000 bans in public schools - which "we haven't seen anything like" since the McCarthy era. Shafak is also worried how the original idealism of the internet has become corrupted. "Everyone was going to have a voice," she says. "Everybody's voice was going to be heard. What happened is amidst this noise and cacophony, people feel like they're not being heard. "One of the biggest ironies is, unfortunately, oftentimes populist demagogues are better at connecting with people's emotions than their liberal counterparts." She believes this has created an ideal breeding ground for populist demagogues like Erdogan in her native Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and now Donald Trump in America. For Shafak, these populist leaders correctly identify the problems but "what is not true is the solutions they are promising". "They're promising us simplicity, fake solutions." The answer to this "age of anxiety" for Shafak lies in confronting these emotions head on and channelling them correctly. "We have to turn these emotions that we find debilitating into something much more positive and constructive, both for ourselves and for our communities and for humanity. And the only way to do that is by reconnecting." This is no small task in a world where algorithms create highly personalised echo chambers. Add to that a concerted retreat of a globalist outlook and it could be an uphill battle for the likes of Shafak. Nevertheless, she is steadfast in her commitment to the arts. For Shafak, the need for literature in this populist age has never been greater. If history is decided by those who write it, Shafak uses her novels to bring to life those who have been forgotten. Shafak's books have always been entangled in how memory shapes political discourse. Her new book, There Are Rivers In The Sky is no different. One of the three protagonists in the novel is a young Yazidi girl. The choice is deliberate. In a community where history is passed down orally, "if you kill the elderly, basically you're killing collective memory", she says - "and when you kill collective memory, you kill collective identity". To immortalise them in ink is a way for her to record their suffering, and resilience, in permanent form. In 2014, ISIS carried out a genocide against the Yazidi people, wiping out whole villages and enslaving thousands of young women and girls as sexual slaves to serve ISIS fighters across the region. 5:58 More than 3,000 Yazidi women are still missing. One young Yazidi woman was found in a street near to where Shafak grew up in Ankara while she was writing the book. "How is it possible that a human being is kept in a house under these circumstances for years, and the entire neighbourhood doesn't know, doesn't see?" It is her compulsion to make the world see atrocities like this that compels Shafak to keep writing. And despite the many challenges that the world faces today, she remains, at heart, a firm believer in the human spirit and the transformative power of art and literature for now and future generations. "In every family there's at least one memory keeper," she says. "And I think writers are the memory keepers of their societies. "One thing that makes me very happy is that the novel, even in this age of hyper information and instant gratification, the long form of the novel continues to thrive, and we are seeing more and more young men coming to literary events and reading novels. "So there is, I think, enormous hope in that too."
Arab News
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky'
Author: Elif Shafak This historical novel by Elif Shafak, 'There Are Rivers in the Sky,' was published in 2024 and is a meditation on life, loss and love. Anchored by the Tigris and Thames rivers serving as motifs, the story drifts across centuries, stitching together fractured lives bound by intimacy, trauma, and the quiet power of water. There are three characters at the heart of this story. Arthur is a 19th-century linguist whose passion for Mesopotamia's ruins eclipses his ability to connect with the living. Narin is a Yazidi girl surviving genocide in 2014 Iraq, her spirit as unyielding as the ancient lands she is forced to flee. And then there is Zaleekhah, a hydrologist in modern London, drowning in family secrets until she learns to swim toward redemption. Their stories collide, ripple and reshape one another. Water is not just a metaphor here, it is a character. The rivers breathe life into memories, erode pain, and carry the weight of history. Arthur's obsession with the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' mirrors his own loneliness as a man chasing immortality through dusty texts while real love slips through his fingers. Narin's resilience, rooted in Yazidi traditions, becomes a lifeline in a world determined to erase her people. As for Zaleekhah, her journey from guilt to grace feels like watching a storm clear — messy, cathartic, and utterly human. Shafak's writing is lush, almost tactile. You can taste the silt of the Tigris, feel London's rain, and ache with the characters. But here is the catch: this book demands your attention. The timelines —switching between Victorian letters, wartime horror, and modern angst —are a high-wire act. While the layers add depth, some readers might stumble over dense historical nods or Yazidi cultural nuances. (A glossary would have been a welcome raft.) Yet, even its flaws pulse with intention. The same complexity that overwhelms also rewards. This is not a book you breeze through. It is one you wade into, letting the currents tug you into deep, uncomfortable places. The pacing does drag at times, and Shafak's ambition occasionally outruns clarity. In the end, Shafak asks: Can we ever truly outrun history? Or do we, like rivers, carve new paths while carrying the scars of where we have been? This novel does not answer so much as invite you to sit with the question, long after the last page turns.
