Elif Shafak

Born in Strasbourg to Turkish parents, raised partly in Ankara and Madrid, and writes in both Turkish and English, which she has said produces two slightly different writers.

The Forty Rules of Love braids a contemporary American housewife's story with the meeting of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World gives its dying narrator the span in which a brain is said to keep working, and spends it on the friends a sex worker who is killed had made in Istanbul. Shafak was prosecuted in Turkey over a character's dialogue about the mass killings of Armenians in 1915, and acquitted, and she has lived in London since.