Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak was born in France to Turkish parents who separated when she was very young. She was raised mainly in Ankara by her mother, a career diplomat, and her grandmother, whose folk beliefs and storytelling shaped her early sense of narrative more than any classroom did. Moving frequently as a child for her mother's postings, she found consistency in reading and writing rather than in any one place.

She began publishing novels in Turkish in her twenties, developing a style that mixed mysticism, feminism and Ottoman history, and gradually built one of the largest readerships of any contemporary Turkish novelist. Increasingly, though, she wrote directly in English, a language she had to consciously master as an adult rather than absorb as a child.

In 2006 her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, which included characters discussing the Armenian genocide of 1915, an event still officially disputed in Turkey, led to her prosecution under a law criminalising insults to the Turkish nation. She was acquitted, but faced further legal harassment over later books addressing sexual abuse and violence against women, and the pressure eventually pushed her into exile in Britain.

She has continued to write prolifically in English, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and remains an outspoken commentator on Turkish politics and women's rights from abroad.