Elif Shafak

Speaker 10:00

This is the BBC Yeah.

Presenter0:04

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:14

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:44

My castaway this week is the Turkish writer Elif Shafak. What she describes as an almost existential need for words and books has led to her becoming the most popular female novelist in her homeland today. But her work has relevance and appeal well beyond the borders of her birthplace. It's been translated into 47 languages. She writes non-fiction and song lyrics, too. The storytelling started early in the little turquoise notebook she was given as an eight-year-old. It was a child who dominated not just by words but by place. Jordan, Germany, and Spain were just some of the countries as a child she called home.

Presenter1:23

She says, to be human means to embody at least several conflicting and coexisting selves within. It is the job of the novelist to peel off those layers and show the heart that beats underneath. I want to show the East within the West and the West within the East. I believe that as human beings we can have multiple belongings. And so welcome, Alif. At this particular point, then, I would say, in human history, where identity and migration and notions of culture and belonging seem to be at the very

Speaker 11:46

Coming.

Presenter1:55

forefront of social and political change.

Presenter1:58

How much do you think

Presenter2:00

Identity is more than ever a very big struggle for us to try to get our heads around.

Elif Shafak2:08

Identity is a massive struggle, and it's amazing that it has not lost its importance. Just the opposite maybe it made a very strong come back.

Elif Shafak2:17

Um and I come from a country that is Turkey, that is very much confused about its identity, a country that's very much in between uh East and West. That could have been a source of strength or richness, but many people don't see it that way in Turkey, and I've always been troubled by that. Partly this is understandable because we live in a very liquid world where so much can change so fast, and as human beings we're a bit terrified by unpredictability. The problem is when populist demagogues tell us, you know what, sameness is going to bring us safety. This is what they're telling us. They're telling us that we should all belong in our own tribes. I've always believed that in this life, if we're ever going to learn anything, we will learn it from people who are different than us. So diversity is precious. It's difficult, but it's precious.

Presenter3:09

What about your own notion of identity? I mean, you started writing, understandably, in Turkish. More recently, you've chosen to write in English. What's the difference in how you can express yourself, and why have you made that choice as a writer?

Elif Shafak3:21

All of my early novels I've written in Turkish first and then about fourteen years ago I switched to writing in English first and that was a big challenge because I did not grow up bilingual the way my kids are growing up so they're always making fun of my mispronunciation. I love this language, the English language. I also love the Turkish language. For me, I don't have to make a choice between them. It's not an either-or thing.

Elif Shafak3:49

Because we can dream in more than one language, you know. Our minds do not make those distinctions when we're sleeping. They don't recognize those national boundaries. So I think over the years I realized there are things I find much easier to write in English. For instance, when it comes to humour, irony, satire, definitely much easier in English. But if there's more melancholy in my writing or longing, I think I find it easier to express that in Turkish. Do you need peace and solitude to write? I hate silence. I f I panic when there's too much silence. I always write in with music and on repeat. So sometimes I listen to the same song maybe seventy-five, eighty times while I'm writing. It's like a loop. I enter that loop and I listen again and again.

Presenter4:30

What?

Presenter4:36

The first disc this morning then that we're gonna hear Alif Shafak

Elif Shafak4:40

So my first disc is by Leonard Cohen and it is the famous blue raincoat. I think at different stages in my life, in my journeys, his voice and his lyrics accompanied me. So I've always been a nomad in my soul and Cohen really was a companion for me during those travels. His lyrics are so powerful. I've also watched him live when he gave a concert in Istanbul at an older age. He came and he was such a gentleman, such a gracious soul on stage and the way he connected with the audience was amazing.

Speaker 45:20

It's four in the morning.

Speaker 45:24

The end of December

Speaker 45:28

I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.

Speaker 45:33

New York is cold but I

Speaker 45:36

Like where I'm living there.

Speaker 45:39

Music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

Speaker 45:46

I hear that you're building your

Presenter5:49

Poor little house. That was Leonard Cohen and famous Blue Raincoat. You have lived, Elif Shafak, in many places around the world for the last, is it seven years you've been living in London? Yes. Why have you chosen to live in London?

Elif Shafak6:03

I cherish the fact that so many languages are spoken on the streets of London and people can live in peace around shared values. And I felt as a writer very free here. So for me I guess I have to highlight this freedom of speech is so important.

Presenter6:21

You have been an outspoken critic of President Rijib Taib Erdogan, the Turkish President. There was a recent referendum, I will remind people, of course, about him extending his powers, his government powers. It was given the majority. It was a slim majority, but it was a majority nonetheless. Yours is. Turkey is a divided country. To what would you ascribe that loss, that apparent loss of shared values throughout Turkey, right now?

Elif Shafak6:46

See you.

Elif Shafak6:47

Yeah.

Elif Shafak6:48

If I may add this about the referendum. Prior to the referendum we have seen a very unfair campaign. It was quite one sided. Almost all of the State's resources and media outlets were

Elif Shafak7:01

devoted to just one side of the campaign, to the yes voice. And the opposite, people who dared to say no, were either intimidated or stigmatized, sometimes they lost their jobs. It's quite murky. I mean it was a tight race, but on the day of the referendum, and I think we need to say this openly, all of a sudden the Electoral Board changed the rules, which was unheard of, really shocking. And on the day of the referendum, in the afternoon actually, the Electoral Board all of a sudden, shockingly, changed the rules and they suddenly announced that from now on they were going to count ballots that did not have official stamps on them. And this of course created a big confusion and cast a shadow on the credibility of the referendum results. So despite all of that, the very fact that at least half of the Turkish society could say no shows us that there is a civil society there that knows their country deserves better. What I'm worried about is a monopoly of power.

Elif Shafak8:09

I don't want anyone in Turkey to have that much power. It doesn't matter who or which party. It's just not healthy. For a proper democracy we need separation of powers, checks and balances, definitely a free media and an independent academia.

Presenter8:24

Back in 2006 you were tried in absentia for something you had written. It was in a novel, it was something one of your characters said you were acquitted for the things that you had written. But more recently in Turkey we have seen newspaper editors thrown into prison. We have seen huge clear out through the judiciary of people who are seen to be unsympathetic to the current regime. Are you more careful now about what you say and what you write, given the situation in Turkey?

Elif Shafak8:50

I think every writer in Turkey and also every poet, every journalist, every academic, particularly journalists, I must emphasize because journalism has become the most dangerous profession in Turkey. But in general, anyone who belongs to the literati, let's say, knows that because of an article, a poem, a book, or even a tweet, we can easily get into trouble. And it can happen so fast. In one day, you can be called a traitor by pro-government papers, you can be almost lynched in social media, put on trial, exiled, or imprisoned.

Presenter9:25

Tell me about your second one. What are we going to hear now?

Elif Shafak9:27

This is a French song by a younger band, Noir Desire, Le Vent Neu Portara.

Elif Shafak9:35

I was born in Strasbourg. I did not live in France for a long time because shortly afterwards my parents got separated and I came back to Turkey with my mother. However, when I hear this song, I think it takes me back to this other connection that I have and maybe I was never able to build. I felt connected to France mostly through French literature. But there's something in this song that makes me very emotional.

Speaker 410:17

Levant Bourtewa.

Speaker 410:23

Toma Saint Jean Grandeur, it's the trajectory of the coup, it is the verse, mansion.

Presenter10:32

Noir desire à la vent nu porterat. As you were saying, Elif Chaufak, you you were born in Strasbourg. You didn't stay there for long though because your parents broke up. You were born in nineteen seventy one. Tell me the circumstances of your parents' meeting.

Elif Shafak10:38

For long

Elif Shafak10:45

They met in Turkey. Afterwards my father moved to France, completing his PhD, and he w

Elif Shafak10:52

became an academic all his life. He stayed in France much longer.

Elif Shafak10:57

So my mother, who was younger, she had dropped out of university, following him, thinking love would be enough that was all she needed in life.

Elif Shafak11:07

And she was very young, like nineteen years old.

Elif Shafak11:10

And when the marriage didn't work out, by the time she came back to Turkey, imagine she had a toddler in her arms, no career, no diploma, no job, and no money, no place to go to.

Elif Shafak11:22

We came to my grandmother's house in Ankara, and this was a very conservative, patriarchal, mostly Muslim neighborhood in the middle of Ankara.

Elif Shafak11:33

Usually, women in those situations would be immediately married off because a single young woman, a divorce is regarded as a threat to the entire patriarchal order. And it was my grandmother who intervened and said, No, you should not be rushed into another marriage. Why don't you go back to university? You should have a choice in life. You should have multiple choices. And that's exactly what my mother did. She graduated with flying colours. She became a diplomat afterwards. That's why she and I traveled a lot. But in my early years, I was raised by my grandmother, whom I called Anne, which means mother in Turkish, and my own mother I called Abla, which is big sister. And so I was raised by these two women, completely different. My mother, very well-educated in the end, of course, very urban, secularist, modern, my grandmother, very traditional, Eastern, spiritual. And the solidarity between them changed my life. In a way, your grandmother.

Presenter12:30

There was somebody I read that I mean, she was quite interested in mysticism. She got up to things that one might consider quite unconventional and quite unusual. What can you tell me about her?

Elif Shafak12:38

Quite like

Elif Shafak12:39

Her house was full of superstitions. Um she was a bit of a healer. People would come to her, people with skin diseases, and I've seen her heal them. I know it sounds completely illogical, and she was always telling stories that oral culture, beautiful oral traditions. So um she would melt lead in order to ward off the evil eye, read coffee cups, and um her house I think was full of magic.

Presenter13:07

For somebody who is intellectually muscular, you are not afraid of mysticism.

Elif Shafak13:12

No, I'm not afraid of mysticism. It's a subject that's very difficult to talk about we because we live in a very polarized world. Especially in Turkey, I found it very difficult to talk about these subjects because you're either religious or you're modern and you should have no interest whatsoever in faith.

Presenter13:16

Yeah.

Elif Shafak13:30

I always longed for a third path. I carry no religion. However, I'm someone who is interested in faith, in the possibility of God, and I not only take faith seriously, but also doubt seriously. I think faith without doubt is a dogma. We need doubt in our lives constantly. And we need a little bit of faith as well, because there are lots of secular acts of faith in our lives. So faith for me is not necessarily a religious thing. And for me what is much more interesting is this dance between faith and doubt. I like agnosticism, mysticism, people who are more confused, still searching, and the journey is endless.

Presenter14:10

Let's have some more music.

Elif Shafak14:12

My third song is called Musser Leu. There are different versions of this song out there. One of the biggest reasons why I chose it is because in my mind it's so multicultural. Muser le originally means the girl from Egypt.

Elif Shafak14:28

However, when you listen to the song, there are of course Egyptian influences, Turkish influences, Hebrew influences, there are um Greek influences. It's the whole Mediterranean, the Middle East in my mind, and it shows so beautifully how music transcends those national boundaries that we mistakenly take for granted.

Speaker 115:14

Kenyana

Presenter15:18

That was Mussoloux, recorded in nineteen twenty seven and performed there by Tetos Dimitriadis. As you say, your mother got educated, got a good diploma, and she she was first of all was in teaching and then became a diplomat. You moved with her.

Presenter15:32

To Madrid, I think when you were around about ten. How did you get on in schooling in Spain? That must have been a very different environment.

Elif Shafak15:38

It was quite difficult for me at the beginning because here I was coming from my grandmother's completely irrational magical environment, zoomed into a very posh international school in Madrid, where I was the only Turk.

Speaker 115:50

In Madrid

Elif Shafak15:53

And this was a time when a coup d'état happened in Turkey, which was awful. And then I remember before I moved to Madrid, a Turkish terrorist had tried to kill the Pope, and the children were talking about this. Turkey got zero points in Eurovision song contest. The next day I would go to school and the kids would make fun of me. I was bullied constantly, and I was an introvert already, so I didn't know how to cope with that. And perhaps it pushed me more strongly towards books. I mean, books really were always my best friends. I was a very lonely child. Maybe it increased my sense of alienation. I started to think about what it means to have a national identity. How come we don't see each other as individual human beings? As young as that? As young as that. Children can be very.

Presenter16:41

As youngest.

Elif Shafak16:45

um sharp when it comes to, yeah, national identities, bullying. And I realized there was a hierarchy of identities. I remember, to be honest, longing to be Dutch or Swedish because there was nothing wrong about being Dutch or Swedish. They were the very popular kids.

Presenter17:01

I am aware in this story so far as we speak I haven't heard anything about your father. I mean, how how often did you see your father growing up?

Elif Shafak17:07

Just three or four times in my entire life. Goodness. I grew up very disconnected from him and trying to understand that emptiness took me a long time. Then there was a time when I felt very angry about this in my early twenties, probably, but anger is very toxic after a while. So it took me a long time to get rid of that anger. I went through many seasons. However, what was much more difficult for me to digest was the fact that my father was a very good father to his other children. I have two.

Presenter17:41

Yeah.

Elif Shafak17:42

Yeah, I have two half-brothers and they adored him always. He he was a very good academic to his own students and a good husband, I'm uh assuming, in his second marriage. So what was difficult for me to understand was when somebody is looks so perfect in all other respects, how come our relationship was so broken?

Presenter18:04

Well, much harder to understand, because if you can look at somebody and say, Well, they're just a reprobate who can't commit to anything and they've left this trail of destruction when actually you think, Well, it's me he's choosing not to include on this. Exactly. Did you turn that in on yourself at one point?

Elif Shafak18:11

Yeah.

Elif Shafak18:13

Exactly.

Elif Shafak18:15

I think I felt like the other child, the forgotten child, for a long time, and in the end, towards uh the later stages of his life, we managed to become friends, but we never managed to become father and daughter.

Elif Shafak18:30

Some more music.

Presenter18:30

Yeah.

Presenter18:31

Tell me what we're going to hear now. This is your fourth.

Elif Shafak18:34

I like Scandinavian bands that make gothic metal and Apocalyptica is a band based mostly on cello and the song that I have chosen is Nothing Else Matters by Metallica. When I was much younger I was a big fan of Metallica but here we're gonna hear, let's listen, a very different interpretation of Nothing Else Matters.

Presenter19:26

Apocalyptica and nothing else matters. Uh tell me a leaf about this little turquoise blue journal that you had when you were eight. What would be written down in that?

Elif Shafak19:35

My mother brought it to me because I was constantly speaking with imaginary creatures around me and she probably was worried about my mental health and she advised me to keep a diary and write everything there because I thought my life was very boring and there was nothing interesting about reality for me to write about. I started making up things. So from diaries to short stories, it was a very short step for me. And from then onwards it evolved into novels. The need to write goes all the way back to my childhood.

Presenter20:11

I'm jumping ahead of myself a little bit here, but it strikes me there was a time when later on you were studying in America and you combined Middle Eastern studies with LGBT studies. It wasn't called that then, but it would be called that now. It's called Queer Studies. Queer Studies. Well and it's a striking combination. I mean how much pleasure do you get from sort of disrupting expectations in that way?

Elif Shafak20:19

Don't exactly wait.

Elif Shafak20:29

Usually, these are departments that don't work together. And I used to teach a course called The Queer in the Middle East.

Presenter20:33

Yeah.

Elif Shafak20:37

Allow me perhaps to put it this way, I always felt closer to minorities, to the other, whoever feels like the other in a given context for any reason. So in my work, in my books, both cultural, ethnic, but also sexual minorities have always played an important role. And in a country like Turkey, I have many readers who are, for instance, very xenophobic.

Elif Shafak21:05

I know when I speak to them publicly, they have all sorts of prejudices against Armenians, Greeks, Jews, but then they come to me and they say, I read your book and I love this character, and the character they're talking about is maybe Jewish or Armenian. Similarly, I have many homophobic readers who have grown up in houses in which they were told, Oh, this is a disease, this is, you know, they're perverts, this is the kind of rhetoric that they're hearing. But then they come and they say, The character I loved most in your story was the gay or the bisexual or the transsexual. Do you belie? Believe that your novels can change people?

Presenter21:42

Yeah.

Elif Shafak21:43

Not not particularly my novels, but the art of storytelling can change people. I know it because it changed me. So I have that faith in the transformative power of books.

Presenter21:54

Did you ever say to your mother, as she went about her diplomatic career and you were transplanted from one place and then to another, and then to another and then to another, Can we stop now? Can we go home?

Elif Shafak22:04

Actually my mother stopped after a while I couldn't.

Presenter22:09

Time for some more music. Alicia Fak, tell me what we're gonna hear now. This is your fifth.

Elif Shafak22:13

So our next song is from Radio Head, Timeless in My In My Eyes, It's Creep.

Speaker 422:23

When you were before

Speaker 422:28

Good look you in the eye

Speaker 422:33

Just like an angel

Speaker 422:38

Your skin makes her cry

Speaker 422:43

Float like a feather

Presenter22:48

That was Radiohead and Creep. Alif Shafak, you spent your twenties pretty much in Istanbul. You were teaching and you were beginning to find great success in your writing with your novels.

Presenter22:58

And then you left for America. Why did you do that?

Elif Shafak23:01

Yeah, I guess I run away in in some ways. For me, Istanbul is like um and I always see Istanbul as a she city.

Elif Shafak23:08

A female city.

Elif Shafak23:10

like a very difficult lover. I mean, I can't help

Elif Shafak23:13

Loving Istanbul, I feel very emotionally attached to the city.

Elif Shafak23:17

And then I have this pendulum, I go back to Istanbul, I feel very suffocated, then I run away, go back again.

Presenter23:25

You and your husband have two children. Your first child was born in 2006, then again you had another child in 2008, and of course, kids.

Elif Shafak23:28

Yeah.

Presenter23:32

They thrive on routine, they thrive on predictability. How much have you had to adapt your own unconventional instincts to accommodate being a mother?

Elif Shafak23:42

Yes, at the beginning I found it a little bit difficult to balance the life of a mother with the life of a writer, because when you're a novelist, it's a very self-centered world. And when your book demands you to stay there, you just stay there. If I don't write for two, three days in a row, the book will shut me off. It was my priority. But of course, with children, that is your priority, and I didn't know how to balance it at the beginning. Perhaps many women go through similar questions.

Elif Shafak24:13

And even though in the beginning I went through a bumpy period, in the long run I learned so much and it brought me a new balance. I think many female novelists experience this. Sometimes we write, especially those who are mothers of younger kids, sometimes we write at nights, sometimes we write during the day. We constantly carve out spaces and little periods for ourselves and then we stitch them together. So there are different ways of writing.

Elif Shafak24:45

To discover that gave me a sense of freedom and balance.

Presenter24:49

Let's have some more music then, Elif. Tell me what we're going to hear next. This is your sixth.

Elif Shafak24:53

This is an Armenian-American band, uh metal band, System of a Down. I used to listen to everything they have produced so many times. I was a big fan of them. This song is called Tropsweh. This is a band that is also very vocal about the Armenian genocide. And so they have that political aspect to their work. I was very sad when they broke up as a band, but I still listen to them.

Presenter25:50

A system of a down and chop suey. Do you have a right to that, Alif Shafak?

Elif Shafak25:54

Definitely. Many of their songs I have played over and over and over again on repeat.

Presenter25:59

Uh cultural diversity, cultural sensitivity is a topic of huge contention here right now in the UK. Your novel Honour was published in 2012, I think. You had a lot to say on the subject of well so-called honour killing, for want of a better phrase. You say this is not about religion. Why do you say that?

Elif Shafak26:04

Uh

Speaker 126:04

But

Elif Shafak26:21

It's about patriarchy. Of course, religion intensifies that. The way I see it, they're all connected, in fact. Extreme religiosity, nationalism, misogyny, authoritarianism. It is not a coincidence that very patriarchal and closed societies are at the same time very homophobic societies, for instance. They're all connected. But I guess what I'm trying to question is this notion of masculinity, how we raise our sons differently than our daughters. And unfortunately, sometimes women also take part in the continuity of those very old and wrong traditions. There's nothing honourable about honour killings. We should stop using that word. And in my book, I wanted to question mother-son relationship and how a son is raised in so many traditional Middle Eastern, Turkish or immigrant families sometimes, thinking that they have a right to keep an eye on the modesty, so-called modesty of their sisters, of their female family members. What makes them think this, the way we raise them, like as if they're small sultans in the family? That needs to change.

Presenter27:34

A while back you said that being a Turkish novelist feels like being slapped on one cheek and kissed on the other. I is that still the case?

Elif Shafak27:41

Yes, because in a country like Turkey, paradoxically, words also matter, stories matter, books matter where there's no freedom of speech. I realize people come to me with books that have been read, just one copy of a book maybe has been read by five or six people. People share books, underlining different sentences with different coloured pencils. And I cherish that connection with the readers. To me, it's very heartwarming. But at the same time, in a country that doesn't understand that art needs independence, where politics dominates everything, you can't even breathe as a writer, and you can be criticised by every single thing, like I've experienced when when I published The Bastard of Istanbul, I was put on trial under Article three hundred one.

Elif Shafak28:31

for mentioning the word genocide, Armenian genocide. We have this article three hundred one in our constitution that has not been abolished, sadly, still, and it is there to protect Turkishness against insults, even though nobody knows what exactly that means. Therefore it's very vague and open to misinterpretation as well. And my Turkish lawyer had to defend my Armenian fictional characters in the courtroom. The whole thing was so surreal and absurd. So you get the slap and the love at the love from the readers, but the slap from the system all the time.

Presenter29:07

Tell me about your next piece. This is your seventh.

Elif Shafak29:09

My next song is uh by Mumford and Sons, Babel.

Elif Shafak29:14

I love this group. I have listened to various albums by them, always on repeat, and I'm a big fan of them.

Speaker 429:25

I know that time has numbered my days and I'll go along with everything you say.

Speaker 429:37

But I write home laughing, look at me now But the walls of my town they come rumbling down

Presenter29:49

That was Mumford and Sons and Babel. You said as we began talking today, Alif Shafak, that we were talking about religion. We touched on it and you said, you know, you're not a believer in essence, but you are somebody who is interested in God, that you're interested in the you've written this too, in the possibility of God. W would you like to be a believer?

Presenter30:10

Because

Elif Shafak30:11

It just doesn't suit me that there's more certainty there when you're a believer. And also I don't feel close to organized religions in the sense that there is at the end of the day a distinction between in all of them, between us versus them. And the assumption that somehow us is closer to the truth than them. That is not close to my heart. I that dualistic way of thinking. What I like is individual spiritual journeys. And those journeys are plural. Everybody's journey will be different, like their fingerprints. So you might be interested in Islamic mysticism, you might end up feeling closer to Jewish mysticism. Or you might start in one bay and swim to other shores. Everything is possible because those paths are based on that individual's own features and needs.

Elif Shafak31:03

I'm gonna cast you away to annihilate

Presenter31:04

Is is there anything about the island that you'll look forward to?

Elif Shafak31:08

Well as writers we're so used to the sense of solitude. I think that very much lies at the core of what what we do. In all other areas of art you learn teamwork when you're a musician, when you're a dancer. But for writers, especially for novelists, when you spend such a long time in your own imaginary world alone,

Elif Shafak31:29

I think we're not afraid of being cast away on a lonely island.

Presenter31:34

Let's disrupt the harmony now and hear your final disc tell me about this. What are we gonna hear?

Elif Shafak31:36

What are we gonna hear? Well, I hope your listeners won't hate me for this song. This is a metal band called Arch Enemy, and the song that I have chosen is War Eternal. It's very loud, harsh music that has amazingly high energy. I love listening to this music when I'm writing fiction, and somehow when I listen to these songs, I produce calmer fiction. And I have to tell to our audience, please listen carefully. The voice you will hear now belongs to a woman.

Speaker 132:17

Ruin or foe, there's no way to go to the battlefield alive, it's kill or be killed. So many times it's a matter of degrading.

Presenter32:45

Arch Enemy and War Eternal. It's time then, Elif, for me to give you the books. I give Castaways a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and then they get to take another book along to accompany those two. What are you going to take?

Elif Shafak32:59

I might take Orlando by Virginia Wilf. Ah, right.

Presenter33:02

That is yours, and a luxury too.

Elif Shafak33:04

I love luxurious stationery.

Presenter33:07

Ah, okay. And do you have a particular pen that you like to write with?

Elif Shafak33:11

You know, I was um I was born left-handed and I was converted to being right-handed at school, so I'm not very good with long-hand writing, but I love.

Presenter33:14

Uh

Elif Shafak33:19

Uh notebooks, fountain pens, so all kinds of stationery would be wonderful for me.

Presenter33:25

Little stationery cupboard. Yes, yes, with fresh new uh stationery in it. And which of the eight tracks, if you could save just one, which one would it be?

Elif Shafak33:27

Yeah.

Elif Shafak33:35

Oh, that's so difficult. I would go for Leonard Cohen.

Presenter33:38

Okay, it's yours. Aluf Shafak, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Elif Shafak33:43

Thank you. It was such a pleasure.

Presenter34:29

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Speaker 435:03

This is the B B C.