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. Her latest, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, is a stylistically inventive fictionalised life of Gustave Flaubert.
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. 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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
