Best-selling author Elif Shafak is the most widely read female author in Turkey and her work has been translated into a staggering 57 languages. Her 2019 novel ‘10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World’ was nominated for the Booker Prize and her novels have been shortlisted in the Costa Award, the British Book Awards and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Shafak returns to Midori House to speak to Georgina Godwin about her new novel, ‘There are Rivers in the Sky’, a timeless story that follows three lives spanning centuries, continents and two great rivers connected through a single drop of water. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is a multi award winning British Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey.
Her work's been translated into 57 languages, possibly even more.
Now.
She's written 20 books, 13 of which are novels, including the Bastard of Istanbul, the 40 Rules of Love, 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world, and her 2021 novel, the island of Missing Trees.
She's been nominated for the Booker Prize, the Costa Award, the British Book Awards and the Women's Prize of Fiction and many more in between.
She returns to the show she's been on many times before to talk about her latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky.
It follows three lives spanning centuries and continents, connected through a single drop of water and two great rivers, the Tigris and the Thames.
Elif Shafak, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Thank you so much.
It's lovely to have you back in the studio.
And we know that of course, listeners can listen to some of your other interviews you've done here.
But for those who haven't yet done that, maybe you could just give us a little brief biography because such an interesting life, really brought up in a very, in a very female household.
Well, it's wonderful to be here to join you.
Yes, I was brought up in a very matriarchal family household, I should say.
I was born in France, in Strasbourg, and shortly afterwards my parents got separated and my father stayed in France and my mother brought me to Turkey, to Ankara, because for her it was motherland.
For me it was a new country altogether.
And we came to my grandmother's house which was in a very conservative, very patriarchal and inward looking neighborhood.
And in so many ways I think I felt like we did not quite fit in at the time.