Turkish novelist writing in English: Who is Elif Shafak?

Born in Strasbourg, Elif Şafak spent her childhood and youth in Ankara, Madrid, Amman, Cologne, Istanbul, Boston, Michigan, and Arizona. She graduated from the International Relations Department of METU, one of the most important universities in Turkey, completed her master's degree in the Women's Studies Department at the same university, and her doctorate in Political Science.

She gave lectures as a lecturer in [universities] in Turkey, the USA, and the UK. In 2018, she was selected as a visiting professor at the Weidenfeld Chair in Comparative European Literature at Oxford University to give seminars on literature and art. She became an honorary member of Oxford / St Anne's College. Her first book, Anatolia to Evil Eyes (story), was published in 1994. She received the 1998 Mevlana Grand Prize with her first novel, Pinhan. This was followed by City Mirrors (1999) and Mahrem (2000), for which she won the Turkish Writers' Union award. Then Bit Palas (2002) and Araf (2004) were published, both of which were bestsellers and reached a wide readership.

Elif Shafak (born 25 October 1971) is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.

She collected her articles on femininity, identity, cultural division, language, and literature in Med-Cezir (2005). In 2006, the most-read book of the year, The Father and the Bastard, was published. Then she wrote her first autobiographical book, Black Milk, which remained on the sales lists for months.

Love, published by Doğan Kitap in March 2009, broke a significant record in the Turkish publishing world, becoming the best-selling novel in the shortest time, selling nearly 1 million copies since its publication. In 2019, it was included in BBC's list of 100 novels that shaped our world.

She wrote Helva (2009), which is a selection from all her works, Firarperest (2010), which she compiled from newspaper articles, İskender (2011), which tells the drama of a Turkish family that immigrated to England, Şemspare (2012), which she also compiled from newspaper articles, and 16th century Istanbul. Her novels Ustam ve Ben (2013) and Havva's Three Daughters (2016) were published by Doğan Kitap, and Havva's Three Daughters became the most-read novel of the year. In 2018, Don't Think You're Alone, a collection of essays, was published. In 2019, the novel Ten Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds met with its readers. The novel, which won the Blackwell Book of the Year award and was a Booker Prize finalist, was one of the 50 novels recommended by The Times to readers. It was included in The Economist's "Best Books of the Year" list.

He was awarded France's Knight of Arts and Letters in 2010, her works have been translated into 54 languages and many literary review articles have appeared in leading media such as The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian and Le Figaro; Elif Şafak's novels, which also write articles in the international press, are published by the world's most important publishing houses such as Penguin, Random House, Rizzoli, Flammarion, Kein & Aber.

Şafak, along with Margaret Atwood, was selected among the authors who will leave works to be read 100 years later for the Norway-based Future Library; In 2017, she was identified as one of the 12 people who will make the world a better place by Politico, one of America's influential publications. She was a jury member of the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She lives in London and Istanbul. She writes her works in English and Turkish.