Do we like them?Do we like Elif Shafak?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record of speaking up for women, minorities and free expression, held back only by a contested plagiarism ruling and thinner sourcing than we'd like.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist who writes in both Turkish and English. She has published 21 books, 13 of them novels, translated into 58 languages. Her 2019 novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World made the Booker Prize shortlist, and she is best known for The Forty Rules of Love and The Bastard of Istanbul.
The story that made her name was a trial. In 2006 she faced up to three years in prison under Turkey's Article 301, which targets 'insulting Turkishness'. The charge came from lines spoken by fictional characters in The Bastard of Istanbul about the killing of Armenians under the Ottomans. She was acquitted for lack of evidence shortly after the hearing began, while supporters and nationalists scuffled outside the court.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. She is widely described as an advocate for women's and LGBTQ+ rights, and her sourcing here is mostly profiles and speaker listings, which we weigh lightly. In 2017 she spoke publicly about her own identity in a TED talk and copped a social media backlash. We found no harmful words, and no sign she keeps company with people who push harm. Honestly, the record we could open is thinner than for some, but everything points the same way.
Her one real stain is a civil one. In January 2024 an Istanbul intellectual property court ruled that her 2001 novel Bit Palas plagiarised another author's earlier book. It ordered her and her publisher to pay compensation. Shafak argued the claim was unfounded in literary and legal terms, and her publisher called it legally baseless. Both sides had two weeks to appeal, and we couldn't find an appeal result, so treat it as contested rather than settled.
On the recent front, she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature in December 2025, succeeding Bernardine Evaristo, having been its vice-president since 2020. She said she was 'very touched and humbled' by it. Her new novel was due this autumn, and she pulled out of the Vilenica festival in Slovenia to finish it.
The good stuff is mostly what she has done with her platform. She has written about Turkish courts prosecuting writers rather than acting on violence against women, and she moved to Britain under pressure from the authorities, though we couldn't open the pieces that say so. She has stood trial for her fiction, and she now leads one of Britain's biggest literary bodies. That's a lot of use of a platform for other people.