Comment from the book world in April 2025

‘Storytelling is a form of resilience. Think of Scheherazade - for 1001 nights, with every story, she survives, lives a little but longer in the face of authoritarianism or tyranny. Stories give us hope and connect us. Sometimes this tradition is looked down upon or belittled, but I think our superstitions are the projections of our deepest fears...

The moment you start asking about minorities, you encounter silence. I became very interested in those silences, because I come from a country of collective amnesia. The fact we have a rich and long history doesn't mean we have a strong memory - quite the opposite. I think writers are the memory keepers of their societies and nations...

In the end, anything can be censored. Once it starts, there is no end. Once you start seeing books and storytelling as dangerous, it won't stop. We're witnessing an escalation not only of bans, but removals, which are done more quietly - targeting LGBTQ+ and racial inequality...

We must absolutely question this duality. Who makes these distinctions between highbrow and low brow literature? There's a very elitist arrogant assumption that if something is read in larger numbers, it is low quality. We're told that people cannot read long novels; that the long form cannot survive. But my observation is that the more the world spins, the more broken it feels, the deeper our need to read novels and slow down...

With readers there's a genuine connection if they love a book, and that makes my heart soar. I have readers from very different backgrounds who would not necessarily break bread together, so the fact they are reading the same book means so much to me. When we read, we journey into someone else's existence, we become more open-minded or ready to connect with someone we might have regarded as other until then. I think in that sense literature really can transform minds and hearts...'

Elif Shafak, the author of eight novels, including The Forty Rules of Love, The Architect's Apprentice and There are Rivers in the Sea in Bookbrunch