About Elif Şafak Elif Şafak (also spelled Elif Shafak; born 25 October 1971) is a Turkish writer and the best-selling woman writer in Turkey. She has published novels written in Turkish as well as English. Şafak has been characterized by critics as continuously and creatively blending Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling to generate a fiction that is both local and universal. Her writing has been defiant of bigotry and xenophobia, deeply involved in feminism, Sufism and Ottoman culture, with "a particular genius for depicting backstreet Istanbul".