“I would like to hope and believe that writers, novelists, are the memory keepers of their societies, of their eras.” Writer Elif Shafak is deeply motivated by the silences in history and the forgotten stories. In this video, she shares why.
”I’m very interested in immigrant families or any family that comes from a complicated, multi-layered background,” she says. ”When you look at the elderly in these families, usually they’re the ones who have experienced the biggest hardships, sometimes even traumas. But they do not talk about the past.” To Shafak, the elderly are not to blame for this: ”It doesn’t mean they have forgotten the past. It’s just they don’t know how to talk about it.”
Elif Shafak has noticed that in most families, the younger generations often ask the deepest and sharpest questions about the family’s past—especially the silences of the past. The same goes for nations, according to Shafak, who states that Turkey’s home country is a “nation of collective amnesia.” She says, “If we are interested in these forgotten stories, and I am, I think you have to become a bit like a linguistic or cultural archaeologist.”
Often, the stories that are told about the nation are all “his” story, as she says. The life of peasants, of minorities, and of women is not being told: “I come from a country where I’ve seen how patriarchy restricts and confines and suppresses women,” she says. “But I also want to add that patriarchy makes men unhappy, especially the kind of men who don’t want to conform to these codes of masculinity.”
Elif Shafak (b. 1971, Strasbourg, France) is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-eight languages. She is a bestselling author of twenty books, thirteen of which are novels, in many countries worldwide. Shafak’s novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal and, in 2024, was awarded the British Academy President’s Medal for ‘her excellent body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range’.
Elif Shafak was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen in London, England, June 2025.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Produced and edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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