Elif Shafak, New Royal Society of Literature President, on Crisis

Elif Shafak was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature last December, capping a two-decade rise that has made her, by many accounts, Turkey's best loved living novelist. Orhan Pamuk may hold the Nobel prize in literature, but it is Shafak whose books readers pass between hands with fervour, as the Guardian notes in a new interview profile examining her creative crisis and recovery.

Her latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, follows a single raindrop from ancient Nineveh to the River Tigris in 2018 and ranked among the UK's bestselling literary novels last year. Two earlier books secured her place on prize lists: The Island of Missing Trees, a love story spanning post-colonial Cyprus and contemporary London, was shortlisted for the Women's prize in 2022, while 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, narrated by a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, made the Booker prize shortlist in 2019. Across more than 20 years she has published as many books, 14 of them novels.

For a long time critics called Shafak Turkey's "most widely read female author". The Guardian now argues the qualifier has fallen away. She is simply its best loved.

What shaped a nomadic storyteller?

Shafak's own account of her life explains the reach of her fiction. In a 2017 TED Talk, viewed more than 6.4 million times, she described herself as an Istanbulite, "a European by birth and by choice" and a long-time Londoner.

"I like to think of myself as a global soul, as a world citizen, a nomad and an itinerant storyteller," she said in the talk.

Her nomadic childhood, described in the Guardian interview, took her across borders before she settled in Britain. Her novels follow the same pattern. They sweep confidently across centuries and continents, taking in politics, history, feminism and ecology, typically with a dash of magic realism or mysticism.

The interview also covers darker ground. Shafak discusses being targeted by the Turkish government, a threat that has shadowed her public life, and she describes a period of depression so severe it threatened her ability to write at all. Her latest novel emerged from that creative crisis, as she wrestled with the question that gives the Guardian piece its title: "Is there any value in writing a story in a time of chaos?"

What does the crisis change for her readers?

The answer, for readers, is a book. Shafak overcame the depression and completed There Are Rivers in the Sky, the novel that went on to become one of the UK's bestselling literary titles last year. The episode reframes a career often described as an unbroken ascent. As the Guardian observes, it would be tempting to say she is on a roll, but her reputation and readership have grown steadily for more than 20 years, spanning as many books.

Her new institutional role extends that reach further. As president of the Royal Society of Literature, elected last December, Shafak now speaks for British letters from a position of formal authority, a striking trajectory for a writer who calls herself a nomad and an itinerant storyteller, and whose work keeps returning to questions of exile, water, memory and survival.