Novelist Elif Shafak on her creative crisis, "Is there value in writing stories in times of chaos?"

The author talks about her nomadic childhood, being targeted by the Turkish government, and overcoming depression to write her latest novel. Today, he is surely the best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it is Shafak that his novels are passionately among readers. There are rivers in the sky that follow a drop of rain from ancient Nineveh to the Tigris River

For a long time, Elif Şafak was called "the most widely read female writer in Türkiye". Today, he is surely the best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it is Shafak that his novels are passionately among readers. Rivers in the Sky, which follows a drop of rain from ancient Nineveh to the Tigris River in 2018, was one of the best-selling British literary novels of last year. Isle of Lost Trees, a love story set in post-colonial Cyprus and contemporary London, was shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize, and 10 minutes and 38 seconds into this strange world, narrated by a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, was shortlisted for the Royal Booker Prize in December 2019. It's tempting to say he's selling out, but Shafak's reputation and readership have been growing steadily for more than 20 years, and he's published a large number of books, 14 of which are novels.

In a 2017 Ted Talk, which has been viewed more than 6.4 million times, he describes himself as an Istanbulite, "European by birth and choice" and a Londoner for many years. "I like to think of myself as a global soul, as a global citizen, a nomad and a wandering storyteller." Her novels confidently span centuries and continents and incorporate politics, history, feminism and ecology, usually with a dash of magical realism or mysticism.

His latest, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, is in the creative style of a fictionalized biography of Gustave Flaubert: "This book is really my love letter to literature," Chafak says. While Flaubert is now considered the godfather of the modern novel—as Nabokov said, without Flaubert there would be no Marcel Proust or James Joyce—most of his life was spent in obscurity. This is Shafak's favorite. This book is about a lonely boy who was misunderstood by almost everyone around him including his family members. This novel is dedicated to anyone who felt the same way. "I wanted to be able to say, 'You're my brother, you're my sister.' That was the beginning," she says.

double quotes I may be in self-imposed exile, but as a writer, I need freedom—freedom of imagination, freedom of expression.

Shafak speaks in long and meaningful sentences with the same fluency and intensity as the lyrics he writes. In person, he also listens carefully and often smiles despite the seriousness of his words. We last met when he appeared earlier this year to discuss the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time: Madame Bovary was in his top 10, but like Flaubert himself, he is a huge fan of Don Quixote. On stage, he had the softest voice, but when he spoke, everyone listened. He has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among young readers on BookTok. No wonder there are spiraling queues of readers of all ages and nationalities signing autographs after his literary events.

In one brief moment, all eternity has arisen from our own historical moment, which Shafak calls "the age of three: anxiety, rage, and artificial intelligence." However, it started from a very personal place when he struggled with depression and anxiety, or hüzün in Turkish, meaning deep melancholy, he says. "In the midst of a world shaped by war and violence, division, climate crisis, technological uncertainty, you ask yourself, 'What is locking yourself in a small room and worrying about its full synonym?'" he says. "Is there value in writing a short story, a poem, a novel in a time of crisis and chaos, such as we are going through? I wanted to take a closer look at this question - creativity in a time of crisis."

This brought him back to the 19th century, another age of change and confusion, in which "there lived a popular novelist who devoted his whole life to literature in a very passionate way." While Flaubert set out to inhabit the female mind – a radical proposition for a male novelist at the time – Shafak alters Madame Bovary's premise to tell his story through multiple women whose paths he might cross. "I wanted to bring together the European canon of the novel with the oral tradition of Middle Eastern storytelling," he explains. You open a box and inside the box there is another, under this story, there is another story. There is a polyphony of sounds."

And so Flaubert's life is told not only through the eyes of his beloved nurse, Julie. His mom is his longtime lover, Louise Collette. and his confidant George Sand, but also an acrobat who, as a child, encounters a camel named Jamila and Emma Bowari herself. We meet an Egyptian dancer and a lady named Kuchouk Hanem, whom Flaubert becomes enamored with during his travels in the Middle East, who is only mentioned in passing in biographies. "I wanted to remember this woman and say, 'Maybe this is the woman who inspired Madame Bovary,'" says Shafak. I would like to claim that at the heart of this iconic French European literary hero is an Egyptian belly dancer. Opium, syphilis and Istanbul (Shafak always thinks of the city as "he") also have their own chapters.

"Every time I start writing a book, I say to myself, 'I'll keep it minimalist this time,'" he laughs. “I think because of who I am, my upbringing, all these cultural influences are like tributes to that. We are all connected not only to each other as fellow humans, but also to nature. "For me, the long narrative form is about honoring these connections."

They may have been separated by nearly two centuries, by nationality and gender, but when she began to search, the connections between Flaubert's story and hers were striking, "starting with that lonely childhood, with a sense of otherness," she says.

Although his parents were Turkish, Shafak was born in 1971 in Strasbourg, France, where his father was studying for a Ph.D. Her parents divorced five years later, and young Elif and her mother returned to live with her maternal grandmother in Ankara. Like Flaubert, Shafak grew up with two mother figures. Although her grandmother was uneducated, she insisted that her mother return to university, which she had left at the time of her marriage. Shafak called his mother "big sister" and his grandmother "mother": "My love for written culture came from one, and from the other my love for oral storytelling." He remembers his grandmother's apartment as a place full of magic, left-handed students and Galva cigarette smoke.

Despite all the love she had as a child, Shafak felt abandoned by her father, a university student who had remarried. Like the famous Dr. Flaubert, Gustave's father, he was "very indifferent, very withdrawn." She didn't see him for most of her childhood and for a long time was very angry that he was such a good father to her half brothers. "I felt like a forgotten child. There was a void. There was an absence of love." "And I think absences also shape us," he says. "Silence also shapes us."

After graduation, his mother became a teacher and then a diplomat. When Shafak was 10, they moved to Madrid, where he was the only Turkish student at an international school. He lived in Jordan and Germany as a teenager. In all those years when I was really lonely, books were my friends." Shafak returned to Ankara to earn a degree in international relations and then earned a doctorate in political science. At the age of 20, after teaching in Istanbul, he "escaped" to study in the United States. His first novel, Pinhan (Sufi), was critically acclaimed when it was published in Turkey in 1997. But his decision to write his fifth novel, The Saint of Incipient Madness, in English was seen by many at home as a betrayal.

The most important similarity between Flaubert and Shafak is that both of their works were tried: Madame Bovary for obscenity in 1857 and Shafak's Bastard of Istanbul in 2006 for "public humiliation" of being Turkish for writing about the Armenian Genocide. Shafak had to live with a bodyguard for a year and a half. His photo was burned and spit on. He was acquitted, but in 2019, his novel 10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world, along with two previous books, Negah and Three Daughters of Eve, which dealt with topics such as child brides and sexual abuse, were investigated by Turkish authorities for "obscenity crimes". Her husband, Eyup Jan, a Turkish journalist and former editor of the liberal Turkish daily Radikal, was on the wanted list as part of President Erdogan's crackdown on intellectuals after Turkey's failed coup in 2016.

He described being a writer in Türkiye as: "A bit like kissing one cheek and slapping the other, with a kiss from the readers and a slap from the government. He is eager to emphasize how much his books are loved at home. "In countries like Türkiye, a book is not a personal item. If you like a novel, you can't put it back on the shelf. You give to your aunt, aunt gives to her neighbor. It's incredibly heartwarming."

But he was back at the center of a storm after a 2017 Ted talk titled "The Revolutionary Power of Diverse Thinking," in which he came out as bisexual. "I don't know if it's brave," he says now. "I wish I could have done it earlier. But the abuse I received from my native land for weeks without a break was absolutely crushing."

He has not returned to Türkiye for 11 years. "There's a sadness to it. "Maybe I'm in self-imposed exile." "But as a writer I need freedom," he says. I need freedom of imagination, freedom of expression. I felt like I had migrated first to English and then to England. London became home. And now I feel rooted here, and I say this as someone who has lived a very nomadic life."

His daughter and son, who have just left home for the new semester at university, have grown up speaking English. His elderly mother often stays with them for long periods of time. "I hope I'm not being offensive, but I think very few male writers over a certain age have any specific writing plans," he says wryly. "The rest just play multiple roles." He often writes at night, while listening to heavy metal, especially melodic death metal, with his headphones. He plays the same song on a loop, often 80 or 90 times. He is a fan of the Armenian-American band System of a Down, which has also been very vocal about the Armenian Genocide. "I love it. It gives me energy," she says. And somehow this story makes him "calmer".

You sit at your desk and doubt yourself, but that's also part of the creative process.

But it does not calm him down. Writing doesn't get easier as you get older, he says. It doesn't matter if it's the first book, the fifth book, the tenth book, you will suffer. You sit at your desk and have doubts. Anxiety, panic attacks are high. This is also part of the creative process." When he is done, he is not filled with satisfaction or pride, but sad. "I feel a loss," he says. "It's very hard for me to let go of the characters."

Then he returns to the world. She thinks it's really important for women to have a voice in public life, and surprises herself with how much she likes literary festivals. "I'm really introverted by nature, so my natural habitat is just a little room full of books," she says. But when I go on stage and do a literary event, it's not a chore. This is not a burden. This is a very big treat for the mind or soul. As someone for whom speaking out has resulted in the threat of prison, he is frustrated by the cynicism towards him. An intellectual in Britain and America, he says: "It is seen as a sign of arrogance, pride. I do not claim to be an intellectual, what I do claim is that I have great respect for reason.

For Shafak, he says, literature is "one of our last remaining democratic spaces where we don't rush from one thing to another, not just fed with bits of information, but slow down and listen to each other again." "The ancient art of story-writing is so universal. It's so timeless. It doesn't really belong to one people, region or religion. It belongs to all of humanity. When I'm writing and writing in my books, I try to remember that kind of..." For a moment he is lost for words. I don't know what to call other than common humanity."

In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak is published by Viking. Order your copy to support The Guardian. Delivery charges may apply.