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.
