Category: Literary
Country: Turkey

About

Elif Shafak (also spelled Elif Şafak) is a Turkish novelist and the best-selling female author in Turkey. Shafak holds a PhD in political science from Middle East Technical University. She writes non-fiction and fiction in Turkish as well as English.

Shafak’s work is characterized by a creative blending of Western and Eastern narrative styles and a thematic defiance of bigotry, xenophobia, and sexism. Her novels, such as the bestsellers The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) and Flea Palace (2004) challenge myths of national purity and present Istanbul as a city that embodies the traditional alongside the new, the Western alongside the Eastern. 

Mysticism is another thread in Shafak’s literary output, weaving in and out of almost all of her works and becoming central to a few. Her first novel, Pinhan (The Sufi) was awarded the “Mevlana Prize” in 1998, which is given to the best work in mystical literature in Turkey. Her second novel, Sehrin Aynalari (Mirrors of the City) explores Jewish and Islamic mysticism against the historical setting of the 17th-century Levant. Her 2010 bestseller, 40 Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi once again takes the subject head-on, interweaving the modern love story of a Jewish-American housewife and a Sufi living in Amsterdam through the story of the spiritual friendship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz.

A public intellectual cognizant of the sociocultural importance of the novel, Shafak continues to write, teach, and contribute to various daily and monthly publications in Turkey, Europe, and the United States.