Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak (born 1971) is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist and political scientist who writes in Turkish and English and has published twenty-one books translated into almost sixty languages ^{1 2}. The Financial Times has described her as Turkey's leading female novelist ¹.

Shafak was born in Strasbourg on 25 October 1971 to a professor of social psychology and a mother who later became a diplomat, and was raised in Ankara by her mother and maternal grandmother after her parents separated ^{1 2}. She took degrees in international relations and women's studies at Middle East Technical University and a PhD in political science, and taught in Turkey and the United States before settling in London in 2013 ¹.

Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, whose treatment of the Armenian genocide led to her prosecution for 'insulting Turkishness' in 2006 and acquittal that September, and The Forty Rules of Love, a bestselling novel of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz in which Sufism is her subject matter ^{1 2}. Later works include Three Daughters of Eve, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) ¹. She contributes to international newspapers, has been a fellow at Oxford, and in December 2025 became president of the Royal Society of Literature ¹. No text read for this record attests a religious affiliation for Shafak herself - the Sufism of her fiction is her material, not her affiliation - so her faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2 3}.

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