Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak

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Amateur Writers vs Professional Authors
It was many years ago. I was in my mid-twenties. I had just completed my third novel—The Gaze. By now I had fully and painfully understood one…
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Elif Shafak
105
Writers Need to Walk the Earth
When I was in my early twenties, one breezy afternoon in Istanbul, I discovered a word that brightened my day but then darkened my mood almost…
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Elif Shafak
41
Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn & Beyond
The news this morning broke my heart. Paul Auster has passed away. He was not only “the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn”. * Perhaps not everyone…
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Elif Shafak
10
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Jane Austen, Taylor Swift and Women's Words
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59
"Write What You Don't Know"
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2
Burning Books, Burning Writers
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32
The Library of Unwritten Books
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38
The Best Time to Start Writing
 • Elif Shafak
18
A Reader's Letter That Every Author Should Read
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25
Separate Taps, Vinegar On Chips, British Things...
It has been almost fifteen years since I moved to London from Istanbul. Like every immigrant or ‘alien’ or nomad or exile, I have left a part of my…
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Elif Shafak
27
A Woman Hidden in History
It is imperative to me and my writing to remember the women who have been forgotten by mainstream history, which, for way too long now, has been…
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Elif Shafak
22
Words Can Hurt, Words Can Heal
Here is something about us “Oriental” women writers and poets that often goes unnoticed. Using our pens as our laser swords we have to fight on multiple…
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Elif Shafak
31
Strange Literary Facts
Growing up in Turkey as a single child raised by a single working mother, and then later o…
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Elif Shafak
36
The Library of Unwritten Books
Far away, in a land on the outskirts of the magical Mount Kaf where all good stories and poems come from and where words taste like the first cake you…
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Elif Shafak
38
Do Books Belong to Their Writers?
A Tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Elif Shafak
15
"Is There An Easy Road To Successful Authorship?"
This month, Women’s History Month, I was invited to read out a letter on stage, along with several beloved poets and artists, at the Royal Albert Hall…
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Elif Shafak
19
Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak
Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak
Stories, anecdotes, wise proverbs and foolish thoughts, literary musings, insights and conversations centred around my personal, unpublished notebooks
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Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak

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