Penguin Books Australia

Penguin Q & A with Elif Safak, author of Honour

What is your new book about?

Honour is about a family, mother-son relationship and how we, knowingly or unknowingly, hurt the people we love most. This is the story of a half-Turkish, half-Kurdish family in London in the late 1970s.

What or who inspired it?

Life.

What was the biggest challenge, writing it?

The central character, Iskender, is a young man obsessed with the notion of honour to the extent that he becomes a murderer. It was a challenge for me to put myself in his shoes, to build empathy for this extremely macho character, but it was important. Without understanding boys/men like Iskender we cannot discuss, let alone solve, honour killings.

What did you want to achieve with your book?

I wanted to tell a story, that has always been my primary aim, whatever the subject. I love giving a voice to characters who are kept in the margins, left unheard in life.

What do you hope for your book?

I hope it will connect readers from different backgrounds and lifestyles, I hope it will speak to their hearts and transcend cultural ghettoes.

Are there any parts of it that have special personal significance to you?

My novels are not autobiographical. In other words, my starting point is not myself. I find writing about myself rather boring. What I am more interested in is being other people, discovering other world and universes.

Do you have a favourite character or one you really enjoyed writing?

I don’t have a favourite character, as I feel and love each and every character along the way, even the side characters, even the ones who look troubled. However I must say Yunus, the family’s younger son has a special place in my heart. Imagining him, being him, was an inspiring journey.

What do you see as the major themes in your book?

Love and freedom. There cannot be love without freedom. And there is no honour in murder.

What made you set it in London?

My novel travels to different cities and locations, like all of my novels do. There are scenes in a Kurdish village, Istanbul, but London has been central. I love this city. I love the multicultural blending here, which is different than anywhere else. But I also wanted to say if honour-related attacks are happening even here, and they are, then that means they can happen anywhere.

Did the title come instantly to you or did you labour over it?

The title had a journey of its own. In Turkey the novel is called Iskender, which means Alexander. However I could not name it Alexander in English as people would have thought it was a novel about Alexander the Great. So instead of focusing on a character I focused on the theme and chose Honour. It is being translated into many languages and as it travels from one country to another book jackets change. In Italy they also changed the name because the word Honour in Italian recalls the mafia, and the novel has nothing to do with the mafia. So my Italian publisher Rizzoli and I chose another title: The House of Four Winds, which is the name of the Kurdish village in the novel.

To whom have you dedicated the book and why?

This book is dedicated to people who see, people who hear, people who care. And why I did that? Well the answer is in this little story I wrote at the opening page…

Who do you think will enjoy your book?

I don’t have a specific audience. Very different people read my work and I cherish that. I sincerely hope people who love stories and the art of storytelling will enjoy it, that’s what matters.

Do you have a special spot for writing at home? (If so, describe it)

I don’t have writing rituals or specific places for that. I write at home but I also write in crowded cafes, restaurants, trains stations, airports, always on the move.

Do you like silence or music playing while you’re writing?

I don’t like silence at all. I cannot write in silence. There has to be the sounds of life, music, the sounds coming from the street, rain cars and all of that. Istanbul is a very noisy city. I am used to writing in chaos and noise.

When did you start writing?

At the age of eight, but that’s not because I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t even know there was such a possibility. I fell in love with words and stories. I was a lonely kid and on my own most of the time. Books were my best friends, they were the gates unto other worlds, and they still are.

Did you always want to become an author?

The desire to become an author came to me later, when I was 17 or 18, and it was crystallised in my early twenties. So first there was the love of writing, the love of stories and only much later the desire to become an author. I have a writer inside me and an author inside me. They are different personalities. Most of the time they get along but sometimes they quarrel and disagree.

Tell us a bit about your childhood?

I was raised by a single mother, an independent minded, feminist divorcee. That was a bit unusual in 1970s Turkey. I was also raised by my Grandma for a while and she was a very different woman, she was a healer and an oral storyteller. To this day I love combining the two worlds, the two women.

If you’ve had other jobs outside of writing, what were they?

I contribute regularly to a major newspaper in Turkey, I write twice a week and I also write op-ed pieces for papers around the world. I am a political scientist by training, I teach creative writing too.

Describe yourself in three words?

Storyteller, nomad, freethinker.

What star sign are you and are you typical of it?

I am a Scorpio and like many Scorpio’s I am inward-looking and love to sabotage myself.

What three things do you dislike?

Hate speech, xenophobia, gender discrimination.

What three things do you like?

Connections, creativity, compassion.

Have you a family, partner or are you single?

I am a mother of two and a terrible wife in addition to being a writer.