“Stories matter, stories shape us. And stories can heal the broken between and within us” –Elif Shafak
There are writers who tell stories. Then there are those who teach us why stories are necessary.
Elif Shafak is, unmistakenly, the latter. She does not write for escape. She writes for confrontation. Her writing is gentle and insistent. Itmakes itself heard in way that cannot be overlooked. In a world made brittle by borders—political, emotional, and ideological—Shafak’s fiction flows like water through walls. It seeps into cracks of history, memory, identity and shame. It dissolves the cement of certainty. To read Shafak is to reawaken the moral imagination.
Turkish-British novelist Shafak was born in France, educated in the West and is currently based in London. Her writing is not restricted to any single cultural tradition and has been translated into dozens of languages. She has called herself a ”literary commuter,” writing in both Turkish and English, traveling between disciplines and identities, and carrying the questions that most tend to leave behind. Her novels are not rooted in nationality but in plurality—a term she prefers to diversity. Plurality implies dialogue instead of mere coexistence.
In her 2010 Ted talk, “The Politics of Fiction,” Shafak argued that we suffer from a collective failure of empathy. Our societies are fragmented by ideological echo chambers, national myths and inherited grievances. “We are surrounded by information,” she said, but we are starved for wisdom. The antidote, she insisted, is not more data but a deeper narrative.
Fiction for Shafak is not just entertainment;it is engagement. It is, arguably, the only remaining art form that allows us to live, briefly and sincerely, inside another person’s skin. Through stories, Shafak argued, we connect the personal with the political, the visible with the invisible. This belief is not only theoretical. It permeates every page of Shafak’s work.
In The Forty Rules of Love (2009), one of her most transcendent novels, Shafak braids two narratives: one set in the 13th century, where the poet Rumi meets his spiritual soulmate Shams of Tabriz, the other in modern-day Boston, where a disillusioned housewife reads their story and courageously changes her life. The novel is about the annihilation of ego. With mystical yet deeply grounded prose, it asks what it means to unlearn fear and to shed societal masks and to live from the soul. The prose is mystical yet deeply grounded, elegant without pretense. It has sold millions of copies not because it flatters the reader but dares to transform them.
Transformation in Shafak’s work always begins with memory.
Her 2021 novel Island of Missing Trees may be her most delicate and profound to date. Set amid the haunting aftermath of the Cypriot conflict, the story follows two lovers, one Greek, one Turkish and their daughter born with their inherited sorrow. One of the narrators is a fig tree, whose roots span continents, and centuries. It is the voice of memory and experience. Through this arboreal perspective, Shafak gives voice to what human language often cannot. The readers witness the deep ecology of loss and how wars ripple through soil, bloodlines and generations. The novel is a quiet masterpiece. It breaks your heart gently but in a way which is also enduring.
In The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004), Shafak turns her gaze on the inner lives of outsiders in post-9/11 America. The novel follows a trio of international graduate students, including one Turkish, one Spanish and one Moroccan, navigate Boston’s cold sidewalks and colder social norms. A coming-of-age story shaped by visa restrictions, cultural confusion, and the surreal comedy of early adulthood. Beneath its whimsical tone, the novel probes fundamental questions about mental health, sense of belonging and the myth of the melting pot. With her signature blend of wit and melancholy, Shafak captures what it means to live in translation, not just between languages but also between different versions of ourselves. For anyone who has felt foreign in a place or even within their own skin, this novel hits like a quiet truth.
The Architects Apprentice (2013) takes place in the dazzling, brutal world of 16th- century Istanbul under the reign of Sultan Sulieman the Magnificent. Jahan, a young orphan, arrives at the palace with a white elephant and is drawn into the orbit of Mimar Sinan, the empire’s legendary chief architect. More than historical fiction, the book is a meditation on art, empire and ambition. Shafak uses architecture as a metaphor for the human soul. which are fragile, ambitious, and built with layers of memory. While domes rise and towers fall, Jahan is forced to confront what it means to be loyal in a world obsessed with legacy. The novel is luminous, but never nostalgic; it asks what we build and destroy in the name of greatness.
What sets Shafak apart from many writers of political fiction is her refusal to sacrifice beauty for content. Her prose shows that truth is not only found in slogans, but in fragrances, rhythms and silence. Her writing never forgets the music of language even when it confronts brutality. In-fact especially then.
Her rebellion is not stylistic, it is philosophical.
Shafak refuses the tribalism that now dominates so much of public life. She rejects binaries—East vs. West, believer vs. skeptic, tradition vs. Modernity—that flatten human experience into categories. She once said, “Identity politics is not a home, it is a prison. In contrast, fiction is a house with many rooms, and all are welcome inside, the only requirement is empathy.”
Shafak brings this ethos into her public life as well. In interviews, lectures and essays, Shafak has become a vital voice for democracy, women’s rights, freedom of expression and the sanctity of literature in the face of rising authoritarianism. She does not offer answers. She offers portals into other minds, other worlds and other truths.
Perhaps that is great literature, the ability to make us pause before judgement. To delay what is certain. To dwell in the complexity of what it means to be human.
In Black Milk, her memoir on motherhood and creativity, Shafak introduces us to the fractured voices with herself- Little Miss Practical, Miss Highbrowed Cynic- and the rest of her internal “harem.” Instead of silencing them, she lets them speak. She writes not from the illusion of coherence but from the richness of multiplicity. It is a deeply feminist act not in the rhetoric of empowerment, but in the honesty of doubt.
Ultimately, Elif Shafak’s body of work is an invitation. Not to agree with her but to sit beside her. To ask deeper questions, to stay with ambiguity. To remember that truth is not monolithic but a mosaic.
In an age of noise, her fiction is a quiet reckoning. In a time of division, her novels are bridges not just between cultures but also between hearts. She reminds us we are more than ideologies. We are stories in motion.
And the most radical thing we can do is listen.
