Elif Shafak: ‘As a writer in Turkey, you can be attacked, put on trial, imprisoned’

The novelist on the ‘surreal’ experience of being prosecuted for her fiction, voluntary exile from her homeland – and why fiction is the antidote to our polarised, fractured times

In Elif Shafak’s latest novel, a single raindrop rises and falls through millennia. In Nineveh, in the seventh century BC, it lands on the scalp of Ashurbanipal, a king whose obsession with building a great library saves the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh from destruction for blasphemy; in 19th-century Constantinople, it lands on Arthur, who has just arrived on an official mission to find a missing section of the epic, depicting a pre-biblical flood. It reappears as the last drop of water in a bottle that terrified 21st-century Yazidis carry with them on their flight from slaughter into the parched mountains of Iraq.

The ninth novel the Turkish author has written in English and her 13th overall, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a story of “three characters, two rivers and one poem”, she says. The rivers are the Thames and the Tigris, and the poem is Gilgamesh. But Shafak wanted to make a drop of water the unifying motif, she explains, because “when we talk about climate crisis we’re talking about a crisis of fresh water, which affects everyone, but in some parts of the world it’s particularly bad. Seven of the most water-stressed nations are in the Middle East and north Africa, and it has massive consequences for women and impoverished people.”

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