Elif Shafak on Exile, Erdoğan, and Her Flaubert Novel — SkimNews
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- Elif Shafak publishes 'In One Brief Moment All Eternity,' a novel that fictionalises Gustave Flaubert's life through the voices of multiple women — his nursemaid Julie, his mistress Louise Colet, confidant George Sand, and an Egyptian dancer, Kuchuk Hanem, whom Shafak suggests may have inspired Madame Bovary.
- Shafak frames the book as her response to 'a time of crisis and chaos' she labels 'the age of three As: Angst, Anger and AI,' writing through a period of depression and what she calls 'hüzün,' a deep Turkish melancholy.
- Shafak was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature last December, capping two decades of growing readership across 14 novels that have made her Turkey's best-loved author, with 'There Are Rivers in the Sky' among the UK's bestselling literary novels last year.
- Turkish authorities put Shafak on trial in 2006 over 'The Bastard of Istanbul' for 'public denigration of Turkishness' due to her writing about the Armenian genocide; she lived with a bodyguard for 18 months before acquittal, and in 2019 three more novels — '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World,' 'The Gaze,' and 'Three Daughters of Eve' — faced obscenity investigations.
- Shafak's husband, Turkish journalist and former Radikal editor Eyüp Can, was placed on a wanted list as part of President Erdoğan's post-2016-coup crackdown on intellectuals.
- Shafak has not returned to Turkey in 11 years, describing her situation as 'self-imposed exile' and saying 'I felt like I first migrated into the English language and then into the UK.'
Why it matters: Shafak's 18 years in London and her election as president of the Royal Society of Literature mark the institutional arrival of a writer Turkey's government has spent two decades trying to silence — from the 2006 genocide-denigration trial to the 2019 obscenity probes to her husband's placement on Erdoğan's post-2016 wanted list.
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