Elif Shafak 

Elif Shafak is a British-Turkish novelist, essayist and public intellectual whose writing explores migration, identity, faith, memory and the experiences of people caught between cultures. Born in Strasbourg in 1971, she was raised in Turkey and other countries before settling in London. She holds a doctorate in political science and has taught at universities in Turkey, Britain and the United States. Writing in both Turkish and English, Shafak frequently combines Eastern and Western literary traditions while examining nationalism, gender inequality, religious intolerance and the histories that societies choose to suppress.

Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, The Architect’s Apprentice, Three Daughters of Eve and the Booker Prize-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. The Island of Missing Trees connects a divided Cypriot family with the island’s history of communal violence and displacement, while There Are Rivers in the Sky links ancient Nineveh, Victorian London and a modern Yazidi community through the survival of stories and cultural memory. Shafak’s fiction often moves between historical periods and multiple narrators, using family histories and marginalised perspectives to examine empire, conflict, belonging and the persistence of the past.