Elif Shafak: ‘As a novelist in Turkey, you can find yourself put on trial, prosecuted... almost digitally lynched’

To be a novelist in Turkey means something different than it does in Britain. “It is a heavy experience,” says Elif Shafak, who at 53, is often described as the country’s most famous female writer. And well, to be a female novelist in Turkey… that’s another story.

“Overnight, you can find yourself put on trial, sued, investigated, prosecuted, almost digitally lynched,” says Shafak. She knows this first hand. In 2006, she was tried for “insulting Turkishness” with her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, over the simple fact that it acknowledged the Armenian genocide, and in doing so challenged the Turkish state’s official narrative. It was the first time a work of fiction had been put on trial in such a way. “The words of fictional characters had been plucked out of my novel and used as evidence in the courtroom,” she says now. Outside that courtroom, “ultra-nationalists were spitting on my pictures, burning my pictures and the EU flag. It was quite unsettling.” Eventually, she was acquitted.

More recently, in 2019, another of Shafak’s books, the kaleidoscopic 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, about a murdered Istanbul prostitute, was one of multiple books investigated by Turkish authorities for crimes of obscenity. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

It’s been nearly a decade since Shafak has felt “comfortable” returning to Turkey. She has lived in London for 16 years, commuting to Istanbul for seven of them before stopping altogether. Still, today at her publisher’s office in central London, Shafak has Turkey written all over her – it’s in the Kohl eyeliner that rims her blue eyes and in the scent of mint tea wafting from her mug. Her accent, too, wears the rhythmic cadence of her mother tongue. “Still, there are English words that I cannot pronounce,” she says, smiling.

Her novels, written in English, betray none of that diffidence. They’re ambitious in their scope, flinging their arms around centuries and geographies, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day London. Of her 21 books, almost all embody her trademark interest in memory and politics. Safak’s latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, follows a single drop of water across millennia from the Tigris to the Thames, introducing characters as diverse as the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a 19th-century polymath born in London’s slums, and a young Yazidi girl growing up in Turkey.

While her first novels were lauded at home, it wasn’t until she started writing in English that Shafak gained international recognition, no doubt bolstered by the legal brouhaha over The Bastard of Istanbul. People may have come for the headlines, but they stayed for the writing. Now, two decades and 11 books later, Shafak is one of the UK’s most popular novelists.

In conversation, Shafak is so blatantly a writer – reeling off metaphors in conversation as readily as others deploy “like” or “um”. That she is a lifelong heavy metal fan is a delightful tidbit; it’s hard to imagine the poetic prose of The Forty Years of Love being conjured to the headbanging sounds of melodic death metal.

Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, where her father was studying for a PhD in philosophy. Hers was an intellectual upbringing. “I was surrounded by lots of international leftist students, idealistic books, smoking, turtlenecks,” she says, sounding wistful. When her parents split, she moved with her mother to Ankara. “Our neighbourhood was very conservative and very inward-looking and patriarchal,” she says. “I was too young to understand and compare [it to France] but I wasn’t too young to feel that we were different. That we were the odd ones out.”

Her mother was a divorcée, a fact that singled them out immediately – that she resisted the community’s attempts to find her a new husband was stranger still. “Usually women in such situations at the time would be married off to someone older immediately, but my grandmother intervened,” she says. “She took care of me so that my mother could go back to university, so that she could have a career and she could have choices. It was incredible. What she did was very progressive.”

At home, Shafak’s grandmother would regale her with stories and lullabies, riddles and legends of the Middle East, the Balkans, the Levant – echoes of which ring loudly in her books to this day. “My grandmother was not a very well-educated woman, because she had been pulled out of school in Turkey for being a girl, but she was a very wise human being.”

Her mother went on to enter the foreign ministry, a job that saw them later relocate to Spain. “I really believe in sisterhood. When women support each other, particularly at those critical junctures, the impact of that goes beyond generations.”

In Spain, Shafak was the only Turkish student at her school. “I remember when a Turkish terrorist tried to kill the Pope, I walked into the classroom the next day and all the kids would make fun of me, ‘Why did you guys try to kill the Pope?’” she says. “Or Turkey would receive zero points in Eurovision and the children would bully me.” Clichéd as it sounds, books were her friends. And writing was her escape. “I wanted to run away into my imagination as much as I could,” says Shafak. She still remembers the day she discovered Don Quixote – the first time she found true freedom in literature.

The second time was much later, in her thirties, when Shafak first started writing in English. “It felt like cutting off the hand I write with,” she says. “Having to refine my literary voice in another language was like starting from scratch, but migrating into the English language gave me cognitive distance and this additional sense of freedom.” She compares it to looking at a picture: “When you want to see something better, you take a step back and it brings you closer.”

That linguistic step backwards has allowed Shafak to hear more clearly the silences she wishes to fill. “Turkey has a very long and rich history, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a strong memory,” she says. “If anything, I believe, in Turkey, we’re a society of collective amnesia. When you look at the history that’s taught to us, there are so many silences. What was the Ottoman Empire like for women? Big silence. For minorities? Big silence,” she says. “Across Turkish literature, there’s a big silence about the Armenian genocide, and it can cut across the board, not only the right [wing] but the left as well. It’s still one of the biggest taboos in Turkey.” To that end, Shafak likes to think of herself and other writers as memory keepers.

Her decision to switch to English was not without backlash. “People were saying I had abandoned my language, that I couldn’t be called a Turkish writer anymore,” she says. “But that’s the thing about nationalism, it’s always an either/or mentality. I’m not abandoning my mother tongue, how can I? It’s the language of my grandmother, my mother and my childhood.”

When it came time for Shafak to choose a new home, she landed on London for several reasons. Due to its intellectual and cultural depth, certainly, but also for its diversity. “I treasure the fact that when children go to school, they have friends from different backgrounds – that they learn to celebrate each other’s cultures and traditions,” she says. The other thing Shafak loved was how level-headed Brits were in the face of politics. “I used to think how amazing it was that British people stayed so calm even when they disagreed,” she says, pausing. “And then Brexit happened and we lost that.”

Shafak is wary about the future. “We need to pay attention,” she urges, leaning in. “We might disagree on issues, but we have to be aware of our shared values. For me, it is an appreciation for democracy. I’m not saying democracy is a perfect regime, but it’s the best system that we have developed and we need to improve it, not abandon it. No human being, no political party, no tech company in this world should have absolute power, that is such a dangerous thing. We’re all fallible creatures. We’re all human. We need to be careful about democratic norms, which unfortunately, we’re losing sometimes.” She pauses a moment, “I’m not saying it’s happening in the UK, but I see seeds of it.”

She is, of course, particularly attuned to these alarm bells. Her ears prick up at the first sounds of tyranny, tuned to this frequency by the politics back home where, she says, “we’ve seen a steady decline in what remained of Turkish democracy” under the 22-year-long presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The day we speak, fierce protests are erupting in the capital over the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and Erdogan’s main rival, days before he was due to be selected as the 2028 presidential nominee. “It’s unacceptable, unlawful and undemocratic,” says Shafak simply. On the streets, protestors are being fired upon with tear gas and rubber bullets. “There are so many people in Turkey who want and deserve a proper democracy. We do not want authoritarianism.”

“Turkey shows us what happens when the rule of law is damaged, when there is a separation of powers and no independent media,” she says. “When you only have the ballot box, that system cannot survive as a democracy in the long run. It can only be majoritarianism, and from there, the fall into authoritarianism can be very short, very quick.” Crucially, that fall can happen anywhere.

Shafak recalls an interaction she had some 10 years ago with a scholar from America who told her it was “understandable” that she was a feminist given she was Turkish. “That statement gave me pause because the implication was that if you’re American, or from Norway or from Canada, you don’t have to worry about the future of women’s rights,” she says. “But now we know better.”

The Trump era in the US has ushered in a rollback of human rights, undermining decades of progress – from the overturning of Roe v Wade to the mounting backlash against the rights of migrants, refugees, LGBT+ people and women. “We have to worry about women’s rights wherever you come from and in America, even more so right now, because things can go backwards very fast,” Shafak says.

When Shafak speaks about politics, there is no passivity in her voice – no apathy to be heard. She is animated. She is fired up. A similar thing occurs in her writing. No matter how bleak the subject matter, there is hope. Even the story of a murdered prostitute discovered in a dumpster somehow still shimmers with humour and light. “The mind can be more pessimistic, and I think that’s OK because it makes us a little more aware of what’s going on,” she says. “But we need to keep the human will, to keep the human heart and be hopeful.”

‘There are Rivers in the Sky’ is published by Penguin in paperback; Elif Shafak will speak to Kirsty Lang on Sunday 25 May at Hay Festival; more information here