Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak learned to study power before she began writing about what it feels like to live beneath it.

At Middle East Technical University in Ankara, she studied International Relations, followed by a Master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science. Her academic work moved across gender, modernity, identity and the politics of the Middle East – questions she would continue exploring for decades, only increasingly through another form.

Because the writing was already happening.

Her first novel, Pinhan, was published in Turkish in 1997 and won the Rumi Prize the following year. As her fiction career grew, Shafak continued to teach – in Turkey and later in the United States, including at the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona, where she taught Near Eastern Studies. Her courses ranged from politics of memory and cultural identities to gender, sexuality, exile and literature.

The subjects were not far removed from the novels. The method was.

Fiction gave Shafak somewhere to inhabit contradiction rather than resolve it – to move between languages, identities, histories and points of view, and to make political questions intimate. In 2004, she published The Saint of Incipient Insanities, her first novel written in English. She has continued to write across Turkish and English ever since.

That crossing between literature and politics has carried consequences.

In 2006, Shafak was prosecuted in Turkey under Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness” because fictional Armenian characters in The Bastard of Istanbul referred to the mass killing of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The prosecution was unusual even by the standards of censorship: it put a novelist on trial for the words of her characters. She was acquitted.

Her work continued to return to people and histories pushed outside official narratives. The Forty Rules of Love became an international bestseller. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, centred on the memories of a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. The Island of Missing Trees explored love, conflict and inherited memory through Cyprus, while There Are Rivers in the Sky moved between centuries and continents through water, displacement and stories that refuse to disappear.

Her latest novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, is published on 15 October 2026 – the final day of Future Forum. It turns to Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary, retelling his world through the women, real and fictional, whose voices have traditionally sat at its edges.

Today Shafak is the author of 21 books, including 13 novels, translated into 58 languages. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, a twice TED Global speaker and, since December 2025, President of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London and has spoken openly about exile, censorship and the growing pressure on writers in Turkey.

Political science can tell us how power works.

Shafak’s fiction asks what that power feels like inside a human life.