Elif Şafak

Elif Şafak was born in Strasbourg, France in 1971. She spent her teenage years in Madrid, Spain before returning to Turkey. Throughout her life, she has lived in numerous cities and states, including Ankara (Turkey), Cologne (Germany), Amman (Jordan), and Boston, Michigan, and Arizona (the United States). She has at the same time been deeply attached to the city of Istanbul, which plays an important part in her fiction. As a result, a sense of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has consistently characterized both her life and her work.

Şafak studied International Relations and graduated from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She then completed her master’s degree in Gender and Women’s Studies, with a thesis on “The Deconstruction of Femininity along the Cyclical Understanding of Heterodox Dervishes in Islam”; and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Political Science at her alma mater. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled “An Analysis of Turkish Modernity through Discourses of Masculinities”. Her master’s thesis received an award from the Social Scientists Institute.

As a political scientist and assistant professor, Şafak has taught at various universities around the world, including Istanbul Bilgi University, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and Istanbul Bahcçeşehir University. Her courses have explored the intersections between Turkish history, women’s studies, and literature, including classes such as “Ottoman History from the Margins”, “Turkey and Cultural Identities", “Women and Writing”, “Sexualities and Gender in the Muslim World”, “Exile, Literature, and Imagination” and “The Politics of Memory.”

Şafak debuted in literature with her story Kem Gözlere Anadolu, published in 1994. Her first novel, Pinhan (The Sufi) was awarded the Rumi 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 increased her readership with her novel Mahrem (The Gaze), which earned her the "Union of Turkish Writers´ Prize" in 2000. Her next novel, Bit Palas (The Flea Palace), has been a bestseller in Turkey.  The book was followed by Med-Cezir, a non-fiction book of essays on gender, sexuality, mental ghettoes, and literature. She received a fellowship and spent a year at Mount Holyoke Women′s College in South Hadley in the United States. She completed her first novel in English, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, there. Her 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 but the charges were ultimately dismissed. Following the birth of her daughter in 2006, Şafak suffered from post-natal depression for more than ten months, a period she addressed in her first autobiographical book, Black Milk, which combines fiction and non-fiction genres. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent novel, “The Forty Rules of Love” will be released by Viking in the USA in January 2010.

Currently Şafak lives in the United States and Istanbul, and continues to write for various daily and monthly publications in Turkey. She has also contributed to various papers in Europe, and the United States, including The Guardian, Le Monde, Berliner Zeitung, Dutch Handelsbladt, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. She also writes scripts for TV and song lyrics for musicians.

Her books:
(Turkish)
• Kem Gözlere Anadolu (1994)
• Pinhan (1997)
• Şehrin Aynaları (1999)
• Mahrem (2000)
• Bit Palas (2002)
• Araf (The Saint of Incipient Insanities) (2004)
• Beşpeşe (2004), (with Murathan Mungan, Faruk Ulay, Celil Oker and Pınar Kür)
• Med-Cezir (2005)
• Baba ve Piç (The Bastard of Istanbul) (2006)
• Siyah Süt (2007)
• Aşk (2009)

(English)
• The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004)
• The Flea Palace (translation of Bit Palas) (2005)
• The Gaze (translation of Mahrem) (2006)
• The Bastard of Istanbul (2006)

(German)
• Spiegel der Stadt, Literaturca Verlag
• Die Heilige des nahenden Irrsinns (2005)

(Italian)
• La bastarda di Istanbul (Rizzoli, 2007)

(Polish)
• Pchli Palac, Wydawnictwo Literackie (Kraków, 2009)

Reference: elifsafak.us; tr.wikipedia.org;