Novelist Endangered by Her Book

New York Times ^ | February 10, 2007 | JULIE BOSMAN

[Lorianne]

It is rarely a simple thing to be a novelist in Turkey. For Elif Shafak, it has never been more complicated.

Her sixth novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul,” was a runaway best seller in Turkey, with more than 120,000 copies purchased. Ms. Shafak had planned a six-city American book tour to promote it, including stops in Chicago and Los Angeles, but sharply curtailed the tour after the murder of Hrant Dink in January. Mr. Dink was a prominent Turkish newspaper editor of Armenian ancestry and a close friend of Ms. Shafak.

Sipping tea at the Warwick Hotel in Midtown Manhattan this week, Ms. Shafak politely declined to discuss her safety concerns, worried that the already dangerous situation could escalate. She travels with a bodyguard now and has been placed under official police protection in Turkey.

This fall Ms. Shafak was tried in court and acquitted of “insulting Turkishness” through characters in her novel who refer to the millions of Armenians “massacred” by Turks.

Ms. Shafak was sued by a nationalist Turkish lawyer, Kemal Kerincsiz, whose rightist group has also sued dozens of others, including Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known and best-selling novelist.

In an interview in October, Mr. Pamuk, who had just hours earlier won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, called himself “essentially a literary man who had fallen into a political situation.” His prize was widely seen as a nod to the political struggles in Turkey, a country whose citizens wrestle with the possibility of joining the European Union while preserving a strict Turkish identity.