For more than two decades, author Elif Shafak has built a reputation as a globally minded storyteller whose novels cross continents, centuries, and genres. With major bestsellers like There Are Rivers in the Sky and Booker-shortlisted works such as 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, her readership continues to grow across generations, recently expanding to younger audiences online. Last December, she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature, cementing her status as a prominent voice in contemporary letters. Her writing career is defined by sweeping narratives that tackle politics, history, feminism, and ecology through a blend of realism and mysticism.
Her latest novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, is a stylistically inventive fictionalized biography of Gustave Flaubert. Living in west London for the past 18 years, the 54-year-old author explains that the book serves as a love letter to literature. Rather than focusing on Flaubert's eventual literary stature, Shafak explores his early years as a lonely, misunderstood boy regarded by his family as a failure. She dedicated the novel to anyone who has experienced similar feelings of alienation, aiming to foster a sense of shared empathy and connection among readers.
The project emerged during a personal struggle with anxiety and deep melancholy, a state she describes using the Turkish word hüzün. Against a backdrop of wars, political division, climate emergencies, and technological anxieties—an era she terms the age of angst, anger, and artificial intelligence—she wrestled with a fundamental creative crisis. She questioned the value of shutting oneself in a room to obsess over a sentence while the world experiences chaos. This introspection drew her back to the 19th century, another period of profound transformation, and to Flaubert's lifelong dedication to his craft.
In crafting the book, Shafak upended traditional perspectives by telling Flaubert's story through a polyphony of voices, blending the European literary canon with Middle Eastern oral traditions. His life is viewed through the perspectives of his mother, his nursemaid, his mistress Louise Colet, George Sand, an acrobat, a camel named Jamilah, and fictionalized iterations of Emma Bovary. She also centers Kuchuck Hanem, an Egyptian dancer and courtesan Flaubert met during his travels, suggesting that this Middle Eastern woman may have inspired the iconic European literary heroine. Despite differences in nationality, gender, and era, Shafak found deep personal parallels between her own upbringing and Flaubert's isolated youth.