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How to pronounce Elif Shafak: El-liff Sha-fahk
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish author of a dozen novels, including The Island of Missing Trees, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Her work has been translated into fifty-six languages. She holds a PhD in political science and has taught at universities in Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom. She lives in London and is an honorary fellow at Oxford University.
Elif Shafak's website
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When the novel opens, we get a peek into King Ashurbanipal's library. He will someday be remembered as "The Librarian King" and "The Educated Monarch," yet he is brutally cruel. The cruel headmaster in Arthur's school, too, is surrounded by books. Some people believe that reading develops empathy, but that isn't so with either of these men. What is your view of the relationship between reading and empathy?
I do believe that reading, especially reading fiction, develops empathy, connectivity, and understanding. I know this because it happened to me. Books have changed me profoundly. Ever since my childhood, they have shown me the possibility of other worlds, other existences, connecting me with lives beyond my tiny little corner of the universe. However, it is also true that education alone does not automatically make one wiser or kinder. My grandmother, the woman who raised me until I was ten years old, was not a well-educated woman, only because she had been pulled out of school in Turkey at a young age; just for being a girl she had been denied a proper education. Yet she wholeheartedly believed in women's independence. Grandma was one of the wisest people I have ever met throughout my life. She showed me how there are multiple ...
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