Elif Shafak

This Cultural Life

In this episode of This Cultural Life, novelist Elif Shafak discusses the formative influences that shaped her literary career. She reflects

Key takeaways

• Shafak's grandmother played a pivotal role in supporting her mother's pursuit of education, fostering female solidarity across generations.
• The transition from writing in Turkish to English provided Shafak with a 'cognitive distance' that offered liberation from political pressures in Turkey.

Main topics

• Childhood memories in Turkey
• Linguistic migration and writing in English

Notable quotes

Language is not an instrument... It is a space. It's a continent I enter in.

Conclusion

A deeply reflective episode that illustrates how personal history, pol

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the best-selling Turkish-British novelist... Elif Shafak. Renowned for epic stories that connect the past and the present, told from multiple perspectives, her novels explore marginalized communities and exiled people. An activist who's campaigned for the rights of women and freedom of expression, she faced prosecution in Turkey in 2006, accused of insulting Turkishness. Elif Shafak's 2019 novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees was a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated into more than 50 languages. In 2025, she was elected as president of the Royal Society of Literature. Speaker 2 (1:06) Elif Shafak, welcome to This Cultural Life. Speaker 4 (1:09) Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 2 (1:10) You were born in France, but you spent most of your early childhood in Turkey with your mother and grandmother, from what I understand. What are your earliest memories of home life growing up? Speaker 4 (1:22) I was born in Strasbourg to Turkish parents. The very first house that somehow is in my memory is full of students, lots of books. Goulouaz, you know, people smoking these heavy cigarettes, coffee, maybe reading Althusser, maybe reading Jean-Paul Sartre. Was Speaker 2 (1:42) your mother a student there? Speaker 4 (1:43) My father was a student of philosophy and my mom, thinking that love was enough, she had dropped out of uni. So by the time the marriage collapsed, my father stayed in France. He got married again and my mother brought me to Turkey. For her, it was motherland and for me it was a new country altogether. But I was very, very little. Speaker 2 (2:05) Do you remember that move? Speaker 4 (2:07) I have a very vivid memory of how we came to my grandmother's house in Ankara. This was a very conservative, very patriarchal, very inward-looking, middle-class neighbourhood, the capital of Turkey, Türkiye. And in the middle of that very patriarchal setting, my grandmother's house was very matriarchal. So somehow I have a very vivid memory of that green, small house with its little garden, the fruit trees, the sour cherry trees in the garden. All of that is very vivid. Speaker 2 (2:39) And you said earlier your mother thought love would be enough. Speaker 4 (2:42) It Speaker 2 (2:42) didn't work out. And she'd given up her studies. Did she go back and study at university when she returned to Turkey then? Speaker 4 (2:48) So what happened was when she returned to... Her motherland, she had no diploma, no career, no money, nothing to fall back on. And now she was a young divorcee with a young child. And usually women in such situations would be immediately married off, particularly at the time to someone much, much older, you know, because you're not very in a favorite position in the marital market anymore. And it was the neighbors, I remember, who were trying to... find someone to take care of the young divorcee and her child. And it was my grandmother who stopped them. She said, my daughter should go back to university. If need be, she can start from scratch all over again, but she should have choices in life. Speaker 2 (3:34) Does that mean you spent a lot of time with your grandmother then because your mother was then studying? Speaker 4 (3:38) That is exactly true. My grandma was not a very well-educated woman, only because she had been pulled out of school in Turkey at the time for being... a girl and she wholeheartedly believed in women's education. And at a very critical juncture in our lives, she supported her own daughter's independence and education. And that really changed our lives. She wanted her daughter to have more choices than she had had. And I think when and if women support each other in that way, Speaker 2 (4:07) I Speaker 4 (4:07) think the impact of that kind of solidarity goes beyond generations. Speaker 2 (4:12) Did you see much of your father after you returned to Turkey? Speaker 4 (4:14) I almost grew up without. seeing my father. He eventually returned with his new family to Turkey, but he wanted to have no contact with me. And for long, long years, I felt like the forgotten child. It took me a long time to realize that actually he had been a very good father to his sons. So my half-brothers are half-Turkish, half-French. It took me a long time to deal with that kind of anger and make sense of that. So I think two things maybe shaped my early years. One is the absence of love from my father. And then the opposite, the presence of love from my mother and my grandmother. Because honestly, grandma was a very compassionate person. Speaker 2 (4:59) Your grandmother sounds like a very strong... and very principled woman. What do you think you carried from her? What did you learn from her principally? Speaker 4 (5:06) She was very principled and I think she was very wise. She showed me by her sheer existence that one might not have a... fancy diploma on the wall, but one can still expand their heart, their knowledge. So it was her that in the long run made me realise there are different paths to knowledge. And the second thing I think I learned from her was she was an oral storyteller and she was very much tuned into the folk tales, the legends, the riddles, the lullabies, not only of Asia Minor, but I would say the Balkans, the Levant, the Middle East, to the best of my ability as a writer. I would love my fiction to be a bridge builder between written culture and oral culture. That too was very much shaped by my grandmother. But Speaker 2 (5:53) that's fascinating. The way that you have just described your grandmother drawing on the storytelling traditions of different parts of the world, that's very much what you have done throughout your whole... career as a novelist. I Speaker 4 (6:05) still do to this day a lot of research into that world. You know, my grandmother's house was also full of superstitions. So she's someone who would be melting lead to ward off the evil eye, reading coffee cups. And her house was full of women. Many women would come to visit her. And I would always observe. I would always listen. I learned the importance of listening to other people from that experience, probably. And these were women who were in many ways, I don't want to say stuck, but confined by gender roles. So I would listen to their words, but also their silences. I think that all of that stayed vividly with me. Speaker 2 (6:46) So you're hearing these stories from your grandmother. Were there also books at home? Were you reading from a young Speaker 4 (6:51) age? In my grandmother's house, there were very few books. So I remember it was just maybe two shelves, that's it. But what I did was I would reread the existing books again and again. I was a very lonely child and I was on my own for long stretches of time and books really became my companions. It was books that showed me there were other worlds out there beyond my little corner of the universe. Speaker 2 (7:17) Are you talking about international fiction or were these Turkish stories? Speaker 4 (7:20) There were a few Turkish novels. There were also folk tales. There was a book, for instance, a very thick tome. It was called The Interpretation of Dreams. I would read that again and again because it was, I mean, you delve straight into Borges' territory without being aware of it. What I would do was to reread the existing books and try to imagine different endings for them. Speaker 2 (7:46) And when did you start writing your own stories? Speaker 4 (7:49) I started writing... At a very early age, I've been writing fiction since I was 80 years old. But that's not because I was planning to become a writer or novelist or anything like that. As I mentioned, I was a lonely child. I was talking to furniture all the time. I was talking to imaginary characters. Maybe my mother, to help, she gave me a turquoise notebook and she wanted me to keep a journal, a diary. So she thought if I start writing down my feelings, all of that would be a good thing. But I thought my life was so boring. I had nothing interesting to write in that journal. So right away, I started writing about imaginary people who didn't exist. School, I really struggled, particularly the first year of primary school. I was left-handed by birth. And at the time in Turkey, it was quite normal to convert. left-handed children into using their right hand. And in a classroom of about 44 students, I must be the last one to learn how to write, even though I knew how to read. Speaker 2 (8:56) Do you still write with the right hand against your instincts? Speaker 4 (8:59) I'm very uncomfortable. If I have to write anything longhand, I struggle still to this day. Speaker 2 (9:10) On this Cultural Life, Elif Shafak, my guests choose the creative influences and experiences that have had the most important impact on their own work. And your first choice is a novel, Don Quixote by Cervantes, which was first published over 400 years ago. When did you first read it? Speaker 4 (9:26) It was in Spain. So my mom, after she graduated and she eventually entered the foreign ministry, the very first place that she was sent to to work as a diplomat was Madrid, Spain. She went and I followed. Spanish became my second language. English became my third language. I had to learn both languages. fast, to be honest, to be able to catch up with the other students. And already I was an introvert, so I always felt there was a gap between me and others. And it was Don Quixote that somehow, it gave me maybe a feeling of freedom. I felt very connected to this crazy knight roaming La Mancha with his beloved Sancho. Oh, that was really life-changing. In Speaker 2 (10:12) Spanish? Speaker 4 (10:13) The children's edition, a shorter version in Spanish. And I loved it. I loved the pictures. I loved the story. Not only the story, but also somehow the craftsmanship. I didn't know books could do that. And it changed me. Speaker 2 (10:27) So how did that novel help you