Elif Shafak: ‘I don’t have the luxury of being apolitical’

The Turkish author, now living in London, on life in the west and facing controversy at home

'I experienced love and hate as an writer in Turkey – you get used to that' … author Elif Shafak. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian

Interview by Susanna Rustin

Saturday 6 December 2014 

It is tempting to read Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Architect’s Apprentice, as a love letter to Istanbul and its Ottoman past, or even a kind of apology to the city she left behind when she moved to London with her two children four years ago. The book, which Shafak wrote in English before revising its translation into Turkish, spans the era from 1546 to 1632 and tells the story of the great imperial architect Mimar Sinan, through the eyes of an invented apprentice and elephant-keeper, Jinan, who stows away from Goa as a 12-year-old to escape an evil stepfather.

The novel evokes the glory and cruelty of the Sultanate at its peak, under Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. But to see it as anything as simple as a celebration of the city in which Shafak has spent much of her life would be a mistake.

“This book is very critical,” she says. “The main historical narrative in Turkey does not talk about human beings and the very few individuals we mention are sultans. How did so-called ordinary men and women feel through the centuries, when Turkey was going through these changes? I’m interested in sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, and I’m interested in silences. Animals of course we never mention, women we rarely mention. For me there is always a desire to bring back stories and subjects that have been forgotten or pushed to the sides.”
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