Elif Şafak

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Elif Şafak (sometimes spelled Elif Shafak), (born 1971, Strasbourg, France) is an award-winning writer of Turkish descent. She has published novels written in Turkish as well as English.

She has been characterized by critics as defiant of orthodoxy, deeply involved in feminism, political analysis, and Ottoman culture, with "a particular genius for depicting backstreet Istanbul".[1]

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[edit] Biography

Born in France, Şafak remained with her mother, when her parents divorced. She spent her teenage years in Madrid, Spain and Amman, Jordan, before returning to Turkey. She graduated in International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She holds a Master of Science degree in Gender and Women's Studies, with a thesis on The Deconstruction of Femininity Along the Cyclical Understanding of Heterodox Dervishes in Islam. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the same university. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled An Analysis of Turkish Modernity Through Discourses of Masculinities. She spent a year at Mount Holyoke Women's College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, United States, on a fellowship and completed her first novel in English there. The book, The Saint of Incipient Insanities was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Şafak served as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States and served on the faculty in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She has since returned to Istanbul, Turkey, a city she has often called a source of love and inspiration for her.

Şafak debuted in literature with her story Kem Gözlere Anadolu, published in 1994. Her first novel, Pinhan (The Sufi) was awarded the "Mevlana Prize" in 1998, which is given to the best work in mystical literature in Turkey. Her second novel, Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City), brings together Jewish and Islamic mysticism against a historical setting in the 17th century Mediterranean. Şafak greatly inceased her readership with her novel Mahrem (The Gaze), which earned her the "Union of Turkish Writers' Prize" in 2000. Her next novel, Bitu Palas (The Flea Palace), has been a bestseller in Turkey, and was followed by Med-Cezir, a non-fiction book of essays on gender, sexuality, mental ghettoes, and literature. On the topic of womanhood, national identity, and non-belonging, the contributed the foreword to Türkçe Sevmek (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2005), the Turkish translation of the expatriate literature anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey.

[edit] The Bastard of Istanbul and criminal prosecution in Turkey

Şafak's second novel written in English is The Bastard of Istanbul (a literal Turkish translation of the title would be "The Father and the Bastard"), which was the bestselling book of 2006 in Turkey. The novel brought Şafak under prosecution by the Turkish government for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code.[2] The charges stemmed from a statement made by a character in her novel, who characterized the massacres of Armenians in World War I as genocide[3].

In response, Şafak suggested that "The way [ultranationalists] are trying to penetrate the domain of art and literature is quite new, and quite disturbing"[3]. The charges were ultimately dismissed.

[edit] Recent life and work

Elif Şafak also writes for newspapers and magazines in Europe and the United States. In 2005 she married Turkish journalist Eyüp Can during a book promotion trip in Berlin, Germany[4]. On September 15, 2006, their daughter Şehrazad Zelda was born.

Following the birth she suffered from post-natal depression for more than ten months, a period she addressed in her first autobiographical book, which combines fiction and non-fiction genres. Şafak has commented concerning the book: "I named this book Black Milk for two reasons. First, it deals with postpartum depression and shows that mother's milk is not always as white and spotless as society likes to think it is. Second, out of that depression I was able to get an inspiration; out of that black milk I was able to develop some sort of ink."

[edit] Bibliography

Turkish
English
German

[edit] References

  1. ^ Writers on Trial - New York Times
  2. ^ The Economist, July 27, 2006, "More Turkish writers face prosecution"
  3. ^ a b Turkey, a Touchy Critic, Plans to Put a Novel on Trial - New York Times
  4. ^ http://www.signandsight.com/features/252.html

[edit] External links