Category: Culture/Art

theartsdesk in Istanbul: City on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?

The arts and the economy might be prospering, but critics fear old Istanbul is turning into a new Dubai

by Sheila JohnstonSunday, 21 April 2013

Late on a spring Friday evening, İstiklal Caddesi, the main shopping thoroughfare in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, exudes all the delicious traditional Turkish aromas: roasting chestnuts, fierce black coffee, döner grills and simit, İstanbul’s bagel, still selling like hot cakes way after midnight. Most of all, though, milling with the crowd, you are struck by something else, something less familiar these days, in Europe anyway: the smell of money.

While the old economies are on their knees, Turkey has been booming: 9.2 percent growth in GDP in 2010, 8.5 percent in 2012. Last year the motor spluttered and stalled – only 2.2 percent growth – but is still chugging along nicely enough.

Since I last visited the city seven years ago, the skyline has been transfigured (many say, disfigured) with shiny new high-rise buildings. İstiklal Caddesi is lined with cash dispensers every few metres, with more lines of people eager to use them. (Pictured right: a lottery ticket seller stands guard by the Swatch shop on İstiklal Caddesi)

In 2010 Istanbul was a European City of Culture. It was a strategic move designed partly to boost Turkey’s application to join the European Union. Decades after making that bid, the country’s still waiting. Though, frankly, joining the Eurozone is looking less attractive by the minute.

“The economy is thriving here and the arts are too. Private museums and galleries are opening one after the other,” observes Azize Tan, (pictured below left), the Director of the Istanbul Film Festival which, now in its 32nd year, has bravely kept afloat through foul weather and fair: the current edition, just finished, attracted guests including Peter Weir, Patricia Arquette, Carlos Reygadas and Bille August.

Run under the aegis of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, which also stages theatre, music and art events throughout the year, its principal sponsor today is Akbank, whose spacious four-floor gallery at the top end of İstiklal Caddesi is the festival’s HQ (sponsors are the main source of the festival’s funding; it receives nothing from the city).

So it’s the banks and rich private patrons that are investing in the arts, specifically art: Istanbul boasts around 150 galleries, two biennials — one for design and one for art — and several contemporary art fairs. The following day I wander down İstiklal Caddesi to see SALT, an opulent, cavernous building owned by Garanti Bank with a walk-in cinema, bookshop, tearoom and three floors of exhibition space, currently dedicated to a show about the notorious 1977 Labour Day massacre in Istanbul, at which 33 people died.

A second SALT venue in Istanbul is twice as large again and there is a third outlet in Ankara. “We have a vibrant art scene,” says Elif Obdan, who works with Tan at the Foundation. “But to make it sustainable there are things to do. Everyone wants to visit Istanbul.” She pauses. “It’s different when you live here, though.”

For critics are talking darkly of bubbles, of boom and bust, of unchecked speculation that will swallow up old Istanbul and turn it into a new Las Vegas, Disneyland, Dubai. Today the perception is that while 2010 did prompt some much needed restoration programmes, but that ephemeral year in the spotlight was, overall, a disappointment.

“We are growing too fast and sometimes hasty decisions are being made. There’s no state control and no transparency,” Tan says. “I’m not against change. But we do need to talk about what’s going on. It’s not always the point to have something new. In 10 years’ time nothing will survive.”

Also on İstiklal Caddesi, security personnel guard the entrance to the vast, Demirören shopping mall. Two listed historical buildings were razed in 2010 to make way for the bling, pseudo-classical edifice which towers over its surroundings and whichMilliyet newspaper described as “a hormone-filled pumpkin”. The manoeuvring, deceptions and extended scandal around the project, are all chronicled in detail here.

Turn right after you pass Demirören and you enter a dark, dingy back alley strewn with dust and builder’s rubble. This is Yeşilçam Sokağı, once known as the Turkish Hollywood. Production houses were based here, and cinemas; Kemal Atatürk went to the movies there. It was formerly the heart of the Film Festival. Now it’s at the centre of Istanbul’s latest arts controversy.

April 22, 2013
Postcard: Istanbul

The Istanbul Film Festival team and celebrity guests joined a protest against the demolition of the Emek movie theatre. Photo: Maria Giovanna Vagenas

Stretching along both sides of the Bosphorus, the cosmopolitan Turkish city of Istanbul is a mesmerising metropolis. A bridge between Europe and Asia, a melting pot of cultures and peoples, it is steeped in tradition but also ever growing – with both historic monuments and construction sites shaping its skyline.

Amid this vitality and diversity, the 32nd edition of the Istanbul Film Festival (IFF) took place between March 30 and April 14, treating its attendees to 500 screenings of 226 films from around the world.

With a reputation for having an open-minded, intellectually curious, thought-provoking and engaged approach to cinema, the festival has a distinctive character and profile.

Azize Tan, the festival’s director for the past seven years, is clear about the Istanbul Film Festival’s identity. “IFF is not a red-carpet festival but a feast for the public; a platform with an open, friendly atmosphere where people can talk about the films and celebrate them together with our guest directors, who are accessible and close to the audience,” she says.

With 15 thematic sections, the festival continued to promote emerging talents and new ideas, and showcase both cinematic history and cinema’s strong link to the arts.

Among this year’s highlights were a retrospective programme of the works of Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas along with a memorable master class that he conducted. There were also stimulating talks from Australian auteur Peter Weir – who presided over the Golden Tulip International Competition’s jury – and the Greek-born, naturalised French filmmaker, Costa Gavras.

The Turkish cinema 2012-2013 section comprised 30 new works (features, documentaries and shorts) and was very much the core of the event. Human relationships, family bonds, and the quest for happiness were threads running through most of the films.

The IFF’s programme also highlighted politically, socially and culturally committed films. And the activism and civil participation were not confined to the screen: a demonstration on the central Istiklal Avenue against the demolition of the old Emek movie theatre, the heart of the festival for many years and a symbol of the fight against gentrification, was high on the agenda, with Tan and her team turning out to protest together with festival guests including Gavras.

The struggle to save the historic Istanbul landmark dominated the closing ceremony too, and made it reminiscent of a good-humoured political rally. The presentation of the Golden Tulip awards took place amid a sea of slogans and placards, making for touching, even heart-warming, scenes.

What Richard Did won the international competition. A fine psychologically introspective portrait of the quietly devastating downfall of an Irish golden boy, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of a Kevin Power novel offers a glimpse into the abyss of the human soul.

With its fresh, idiosyncratic approach to everyday life in a small provincial city, Thou Gild’st the Even by Onur Ünlü won the Golden Tulip in the national category. Shot in black and white, and gently shifting from reality into an imaginary, slightly absurd world, the Turkish filmmaker stunningly describes an ordinary population with extraordinary talents.

Set in the upper middle-class milieu of Istanbul, Lifelong, a stylish psychological drama about a couple trapped in a hollow relationship but unable to break up, won Asli Özge the award for best director.

Deniz Akçay Katiksiz took the best debut film award with Nobody’s Home. A mature work with a strong autobiographical touch, it is a sharply observed study of the conflict caused by the inability to communicate between four family members following the death of the father.

Ercan Kesal won the best actor award for his role in Mahmut Fazil Coskun’s humorous melodrama about ageing, Yozgat Blues.

The human rights competition prize went to The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi.

April 22, 2013

Turkey’s New Taboo

Turkish classical pianist Fazil Say performs during a concert in Ankara, Oct. 14, 2010. (photo by REUTERS)

No doubt that the decision of a Turkish court passing a 10-month suspended prison term on world famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say for “insulting religion and as such committing an act conducive to disrupting the public peace” with his tweets and retweets a year ago is a heavy blow to freedom of expression in Turkey.

About This Article

Summary :

The 10-month suspended prison sentence of pianist Fazil Say on grounds of his (re)tweets is the signal for an introduction of a new taboo called “Sunni Islam” in Turkey, writes Kadri Gursel.

Original Title:
Turkey’s New Taboo
Author: Kadri Gursel
Translated by: Timur Goksel

But if we confine our reaction only to heavy damage inflicted on “freedom of expression” and by extension to democracy, we will be missing out on the political and ideological context of the court’s opinion and the objective behind it.

The court’s opinion on Fazil Say is directly related to the process of regime change in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is the new alliance of the conservative bourgeoisie and neo-Islamist political class, has won the struggle for power against the secularist, military and bureaucratic tutelage forces who see themselves as guardians of the former Kemalist Republic, and has also consolidated its control of the judiciary. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP is now using the extensive power it has accumulated with the support of the Sunni conservative public segment to impose its political culture on the entire population. And they are doing that with an authoritarian approach.

The authoritarian political culture of former Turkey had its peculiar taboos reinforced by judicial rulings and judgments passed. “Turkism” and “Ataturk” were totally made untouchable by judicial opinions. Soldiers were feared. There was practically a ban on speaking about the Kurdish issue and the Armenian genocide. None of this prevails anymore.

Now, no one has to get permission from the minister of justice to investigate charges of “insulting Turkism.” Ataturk is not protected by the judiciary anymore. Nothing happens to anyone who says he was a dictator. Kurdish and Armenian issues have long ceased to be a taboo. The new Turkey is moving forward to bring a political solution to the Kurdish issue.

But all these developments do not mean that Turkey is free of its taboos. New taboos are introduced and the judicial rulings are playing a part in the evolution of these taboos, just as the opinion rendered against Fazil Say.

Before dwelling on the new taboo under construction with the opinion expounding on the 10-month suspended prison term against the pianist, let’s recall the tweets that, according to the court, constitute a crime.

Fazil Say did not write the following tweet, he simply retweeted it: “I am not sure if you have noticed, but where there is a louse, a non-entity, a low life, thief or idiot, they are all pro-Allah [Islamists]. Is this a paradox?” The court did not punish the original writer but the pianist. This tweet did not target religious people but was actually a satire on how weak people portray themselves as religious to acquire power and benefits from the Islamist government.

In this tweet, Fazil Say was having fun with a muezzin whose call for the evening prayer was unbearable: “The muezzin recited the evening prayer in 22 seconds. Pretissimo con fuca!!! What is your hurry? A lover? Raki [a Turkish liqueur flavored with aniseed]?”

Fazil Say’s tweet of a stanza attributed, controversially, to poet Omar Khayyam who lived in Iran in the 11th century was also a crime according to the court: “You say that the rivers flow with wine, is Heaven a tavern? You say that you will give every believer two very beautiful women, is Heaven a brothel?”

The Turkish court sentenced the pianist basing itself on article 216/3 of the Turkish penal code. The article says: “The person who openly denigrated religious values adopted by a segment of the public will be sentenced to a 6- to 12-month prison term if that act is conducive to disrupting public peace.”

As can be seen, to facilitate passing of a sentence that stipulates “an act conducive to disrupting public peace” was included in the article.

That means the court decided that public peace was threatened by Fazil Say’s tweets. But there is no concrete, convincing evidence of that threat. The only reactions to Fazil Say are the angry tweets sent to him by the Islamist and religious public and the articles against him on some pro-government, Islamist websites. That is why nobody was aware of public peace being on the verge of breaking down. But the court decision truly made Fazil Say a target. Actually, public peace became susceptible to disruption only after the court decision.

The goal of the court decision is not to protect public peace but to build and reinforce a new taboo of this country. This taboo is “Sunni Islam religiosity.”

The court declared its opinion on April 18. In justifying its decision, the court said the tweets “do not contribute anything to the public debate but unnecessarily offend the common values of Allah, heaven and hell of the three major religions in the world, and were written to denigrate religious values by creating the opinion that these concepts are meaningless, unwarranted and worthless.” It isn’t clear how the court found itself intellectually authorized to declare that such tweets do not contribute anything to the public debate.

It is clear, however, that the court’s real concern is to inhibit the debate on religious concepts. In supporting the ruling, the court stresses that the susceptibility of these tweets to disrupt public peace actually incorporates an abstract threat and the court did not have to wait for that threat to become a fact before sentencing.

These expressions are proof that freedom of thought and expression as well as the future of democracy in Turkey is now put on a very perilous path by the judiciary.

It means that from now on the judiciary is allowed to apply abstract and subjective assessments to any public debate of religiosity and religion, and ban such debates by declaring them to be “conducive to disrupting public peace.”

Some may find Fazil Say’s tweets shocking, disruptive or aggressive. But none of these are contrary to the spirit of freedom of expression when what is challenged are dominant values and concepts.

The red lines drawn in Turkey with this judicial decision declares “Sunni Islam religiosity” to be immune from criticism.

It is not possible to aver that the judiciary has done its duty of protecting minority beliefs and trends from crimes of hatred deriving its power from the majority.

Kadri Gürsel is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor‘s Turkey Pulse and has written a column for the Turkish daily Milliyet since 2007. He focuses primarily on Turkish foreign policy, international affairs and Turkey’s Kurdish question, as well as Turkey’s evolving political Islam.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/04/turkey-fazil-say-blasphemy-sunni-islam.html#ixzz2RAk9gE2o

April 22, 2013

Turkish literature to look out for

By Sameer Rahim

Müge İplikçi

Visitors to Istanbul usually stay close to the old town, where Byzantine relics vie with Ottoman splendour. They walk in the footsteps of European travel writers from Nerval to Flaubert, who were attracted by its oriental aspects: caliphs, harems and dervishes. As Orhan Pamuk writes in his enchanting memoir Istanbul, Eastern strangeness exerts a powerful pull – even on those from the city.

But any visitor who crosses the Golden Horn will find a teeming metropolis of 10 million. There you will find stories that have as little to do with the Blue Mosque as most modern Londoners have with St Paul’s.

Part of the difficulty we have in reading Turkish writers is that Turks themselves have not been able to read them either. After the founding of the republic in 1923, the language was reformed to be written in Latin rather than Arabic script – at a stroke cutting the people off from their literary heritage.

While I was in Istanbul last week, I spoke to the critic Murat Belge. “After the end of the empire,” he told me, “the republic turned inward.” Greeks and Armenians, who in 1900 made up half the population of Istanbul, left a country that became more narrowly nationalistic.

In later years, especially after the military coup of 1980, censorship and a crackdown on “Marxist” or “obscene” literature made life difficult for publishers. I spoke to Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, co-founder of Metis Books, who was active in radical circles at the time. “It was a very difficult time,” she said. “50,000 people were put in prison.” Translating the wrong type of book into Turkish could land you in jail.

Sökmen has also defended Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul in court. Shafak won the case but the cost of such cases can be crippling.

Another publisher, Can Öz, spoke to me about bringing out Paul Auster’s Winter Journal last year. Auster had told Hürriyet newspaper that he didn’t want to visit Turkey “because of imprisoned journalists and writers”.

His comments brought an extraordinary response from the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He told a party meeting that Auster was “an ignorant man”, adding: “If you come, so what? If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?”

Despite his opposition, Winter Journal sold 20,000 copies on its release in Turkey. Öz also told me about a project that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: a biography of Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Öcalan.

It’s easy, however, to get caught up in skirmishes over freedom of speech. In reality, Turkish literature has never been more free.

The country is the focus nation at this month’s London Book Fair. Among the 20 writers the British Council is bringing over to London is the crime writer Ahmet Ümit, whose most recent novel in English, A Memento for Istanbul, is a thriller set in the days of the Byzantine Empire. One, I suspect, for fans of Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a medieval murder mystery set in Ottoman-era Istanbul.

Another name that might be unfamiliar to British readers is Müge Iplikçi. An experienced author of novels for both adults and children, Iplikçi’s Mount Kaf will be published in English this autumn. The novel takes the reader on a dark journey into the CIA rendition programme as well as taking in the devastating earthquake of 1999.

The Turkish inwardness Belge complained about is now a thing of the past. Nearly 35 per cent of books bought in Turkey are translated from foreign languages. We could learn from their example.

* The Market Focus Cultural Programme at The London Book Fair is curated by the British Council. Visit www.literature.britishcouncil.org

via Turkish literature to look out for – Telegraph.

April 17, 2013
Turkey’s historic Emek theatre facing final curtain

Campaigners stage protest at plans to demolish historic venue to make way for a shopping and entertainment complex

Constanze Letsch Istanbul

guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 April 2013 21.00 BST

A woman makes a protest speech outside the former Emek cinema. Photograph: Karadeniz/Corbis

It is Turkey’s oldest and most prestigious cinema, an Istanbul landmark that dates back to the early days of Atatürk’s rule – and a centrepiece until recently of the city’s international film festival.

So plans to demolish the Emek theatre and turn the space into an entertainment and shopping venue have generated widespread disapproval – not least at the recent film festival, at which film directors, critics and residents came together in a passionate protest against the building project.

In 1924, the theatre opened its doors as part of the Cercle d’Orient complex, a listed art deco building designed in 1884 by Levantine architect Alexandre Vallaury. Despite massive public protest the building was leased to a private developer who plans to turn it into an entertainment and shopping complex. Demolition work started last week.

After a lengthy legal battle a local court approved the developer’s plans last December. The company announced plans to move the theatre to the fourth floor of the new building, but critics fear the Emek theatre will effectively be destroyed.

Azize Tan, director of the Istanbul film festival, thinks the demolition of the Emek theatre is a tragic mistake. “The theatre is a symbol for Turkish cinema that we need to protect,” she said. She said its closure in 2010 had had a negative impact on the festival. “Every big film festival has its flagship venue. The Emek theatre was ours for 28 years, and there is nothing to replace it with,” she said.

The closure of the cinema, which seats 875, also meant a substantial loss of capacity for the festival’s organisers. Since 1958, the cinema has been publicly owned and has provided the backdrop for small, courageous revolts: the first big public 1 May celebrations after the military coup of 1980 took place there, it housed leftwing concerts and did not shy away from screening Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ while religious groups protested outside.

“People in Istanbul have a very strong bond with the Emek theatre,” said Nil Kural, a journalist and member of the FIPRESCI jury of critics.

“We all discovered our love for films and cinema here.”

Many agree. Turkish film-maker Yüksel Aksu said the theatre had been the sole place of his cinematographic education. Addressing the Turkish government, he shouted: “If you cannot conserve this place, you will not call yourself a conservative. You will call yourself barbarian.”

The Emek theatre protests are a symbol for the right to decide over the fate of the city whose cultural and historical heritage is increasingly at stake. Many are critical of the unchecked urban development that is rapidly remaking Istanbul, and of ever-larger projects being forced on its residents without any public debate.

Only last week, the government approved a plan widely known as the “crazy project” to dig a canal parallel to the Bosphorus Straits. Meanwhile, whole historical neighbourhoods are being demolished to make room for profitable real estate ventures.

Last Sunday a peaceful demonstration against the demolition of the Emek theatre was dispersed with water cannons and teargas. Greek film director Costa-Gavras, who was among last week’s protesters, appealed in a letter to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to save the theatre. “A prominent theatre, a cultural centre must not be destroyed. It’s like erasing a part of our memory and removing a significant place for the future. Therefore it would be a political, social and artistic failure,” he wrote.

Tan criticised the apparent lack of transparency. “Both the government and the developers refuse to reveal the entirety of the project. Nobody talks to us,” she said.

Nil Kural believes the discussion should not be based on profitability. “The Emek theatre is part of Istanbul’s cultural heritage and it should be preserved as such. Why should it have to be profitable? It needs to be supported. Would you close down a museum and turn it into a shopping centre if it doesn’t generate enough profit?” she said. She said she was still hopeful the theatre could be saved. “If the government intervenes now, we will be able to get our beloved Emek cinema back.”

via Turkey’s historic Emek theatre facing final curtain | World news | guardian.co.uk.

April 16, 2013
Fear is a very dangerous thing

Elif Shafak: ‘Fear is a very dangerous thing’

The voice of Turkish literature – tells Joy Lo Dico why Istanbul needs to make another great leap

JOY LO DICO

When I invited Elif Shafak to lunch at Julie’s, a smart London restaurant tucked between the Victorian town houses of Holland Park, I hadn’t considered the decor. Carved wooden panels, rugs and leather stools: it looked like someone had made a quick raid on the Ottoman Empire to furnish it. Would Shafak, who is from Istanbul, roll her eyes at the cliché of inviting her to a faux oriental den? She looks around. “How lovely,” she says, a little coolly.

Dressed head to toe in black (she claims that this is the only colour in her wardrobe) and with the looks of a French film star, Shafak is an easy choice to be the face for the London Book Fair, the special focus of which this year is Turkish literature. Her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She followed it with a retelling of the life of the 13th-century poet Rumi folded into the life of a bored Jewish-American housewife, in The Forty Rules of Love. And last year she published Honour, the story of an “honour” killing by a Turkish Kurdish family living between their home country and Dalston.

That diversity comes from her own internationalism. Born in Strasbourg, she’s lived across Europe and America and now divides her time between Istanbul, where her husband is editor-in-chief of a newspaper, and London.

“It’s like a compass,” she explains. “One leg of the drawing compass is fixed in one spot. For me that is Istanbul. The other leg draws a huge, wide circle around this one and I see myself as global soul, as a world citizen.”

Shafak’s writing is not high literature in the Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk vein: the prose is open, the pages turn easily, plots sometimes twist too conveniently and The Forty Rules of Love‘s spirituality brings to mind Paulo Coelho. But Shafak has big ideas – about women’s rights, identity, freedom of expression – that really challenge readers, and her novels work hard at bringing out unheard voices.

It’s reflected in her readership. The queues at her book signings, Shafak notes proudly, are made up of “people who normally wouldn’t break bread together: liberals, leftists, secularists, Sufis, conservatives; girls with headscarves but also women with mini skirts”.

As we pick over the skeletons of our grilled sardines, it occurs to me that Shafak makes waves with wide-selling literature – so popular that her books are pirated in Turkey – but that the forms and ideas are not so radical to Britons – an exception perhaps is her exploration of “honour” killings. Her real strength lies in her eloquence on politics and culture, she writes columns on both for the newspaper Haberturk.

It is 90 years since Kemal Ataturk declared Turkey a republic, and this past decade has seen it walking tall despite “being left in the waiting room”, as Shafak says, by the EU. The steady government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, economic growth, a grown-up regional policy and, as of last month, a ceasefire with the PKK (the Kurdish nationalist movement fighting for independence for the past 30 years), has returned Turkey as a significant player to the world stage.

Shafak welcomes reconciliation with the Kurds but is already thinking one step ahead: about changing the nature of modern Turkey. “What we need is a new constitution which is more embracing, not only of Turks and Kurds but also the minorities in Turkey who are not feeling comfortable: Armenians, Jews, Azeris, gypsies, and others,” she suggests, seeing this as a time when Turkey could reconstruct its whole self-image. “Our 600-year-old empire was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, amazingly cosmopolitan. In 1923, the nation state was established and, throughout the republican era, the main discourse was that we are a society of undifferentiated individuals. No classes, no ethnicities. Seeing difference as the source of danger and looking for enemies within created a lot of fear in Turkey, and fear is a very dangerous thing because it produces authoritarian responses. I’m not saying Ataturk’s Turkey should be abandoned: I’m saying we need to take a step forward and have a far more egalitarian and democratic society. What I find frightening is top-down uniformity.”

The blooming of identities she talks of – she includes homosexuals and transsexuals – echoes the voices in her books. But Shafak, remembering how quickly her comments have been twisted in parts of the Turkish media, chooses her words carefully. In 2006, after writing about the Armenian genocide, an ultra-nationalist group had her put on trial under an archaic law for “insulting Turkishness”.

The Turkish Ministry of Justice now intervenes to prevent such trials but the law remains. Shafak drives it home with a British analogy. “The other day I was thinking, when Hilary Mantel was ‘criticising’ Kate Middleton, that there was a discussion in the UK media,” she says. “Everyone was asking, ‘Is she right or wrong?’ But as a Turkish writer, my main interest was not who was right or wrong but that this debate can be heard freely.”

We move on to the mint tea and Shafak points out that Britain and Turkey, both of which she calls home, have taken different routes out of empire. London remains a global crossroads but Istanbul risks forgetting the way porous boundaries helped it thrive. It is the subject of her next novel, which will be set in the 16th century.

Shafak will be taking part in a series of seminars and talks at the London Book Fair next Tuesday, along with other big hitters in the Turkish literary scene, including Perihan Magden, Ayse Kulin and Ahmet Umit. Shafak knows how to pitch to a bigger audience than just those who want to dabble in the Orient: “The conversations we are having about identity, amnesia, past and future don’t concern solely the society in Turkey but they resonate through the Muslim world, and the world in general.”

Honour by Elif Shafak

Penguin, £7.99

‘It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, Naze continued, whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other. As to why He had done that, it wasn’t up to human beings to question … ”

The Market Focus Cultural Programme at The London Book Fair is curated by the British Council and begins tomorrow. For more information visit: literature.britishcouncil.org

April 16, 2013