Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

1923), whose best-known work is Mehmed, My Hawk. Two of Kemal’s novels – The Birds Are Also Gone and The Sea-Crossed Fisherman – are set in İstanbul. High-profile writer Elif Şafak was born in Strasbourg in 1971 to Turkish parents and now divides her time between London and İstanbul. Her best known novels are The Flea Palace (2002), The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004), The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) , The Forty Rules of Love (2010) and Honour (2012). Şafak’s novels often address issues that are controversial in Turkey (eg honour killing, gay identity, the Armenian genocide, sex before marriage). Her most recent novel, The Architect’s Apprentice (2014), revolves around the life of the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. It, The Flea Palace and The Bastard of Istanbul are all set in the city. Arrested after the 1980 military coup, left-wing activist Izzet Celasin (b 1958) spent several years in a Turkish jail before being granted political asylum in Norway. His debut novel Black Sky, Black Sea (2012) is a semi autobiographical story about young activists in İstanbul during the period of political unrest in the late 1970s. The timing of the novel’s release (just before the Gezi protests of 2013) made it resonate both in Turkey and overseas. Selçuk Altun (b 1950) uses İstanbul as a setting in many of his novels. Sometimes mysteries, sometimes historical yarns, they include Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (2007), Many and Many a Year Ago (2008) and The Sultan of Byzantium (2011). Other contemporary Turkish novelists of note include İstanbul-born Nobel Prize–winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Ümit (b 1960) and Perihan Mağden (b 1960).