Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist and essayist who writes in both Turkish and English, and whose fiction reaches for the people official histories leave out: sex workers, minorities, the dead who are not counted. The Bastard of Istanbul brought her a prosecution for insulting Turkishness, of which she was acquitted. She is also a political scientist by training, and her essays argue for pluralism against the pull of national myth.