"Turkish society exists in a state of collective amnesia'

Nearly two decades after being put on trial for her writing and ahead of her talk at the Hay Festival, novelist Elif Shafak speaks with Annabel Nugent about democracy and her life

- Annabel Nugent

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.