Ms. Shafak was prosecuted in Turkey over comments made by characters in her book
A writer whose novel put her on trial for “insulting Turkishness” made the longlist for a prestigious British fiction prize on Tuesday. Elif Shafak, author of the bestseller “The Bastard of Istanbul” was one of 20 writers longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Ms. Shafak was prosecuted in Turkey over comments made by characters in her book about the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.
She was acquitted by an Istanbul court in 2006. The book interweaves stories of a Turkish and an Armenian family in the United States and Istanbul. Nobel Prize winner More articles about Orhan Pamuk." Orhan Pamuk and other Turkish intellectuals have been prosecuted for the same offense.
In January of 2007, Ms. Shafak cut short a book tour promoting the novel in the United States because of fears for her safety after the murder of "More articles about Hrant Dink." , a newspaper editor who was prosecuted for challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 More articles about the Armenian genocide." Armenian genocide, her publisher said.
She was attacked on nationalist Web sites the publisher, Paul Slovak, of Viking, said at the time. Ms. Shafak was born in France and is of Turkish descent. The Orange Prize is open to any woman writing in English. The novel is one of several in this year’s longlist to deal with The winner will be announced at a ceremony on June 4. NYT 19/03/08
Elif Shafak has chosen to write The Bastard of Istanbul in English, a decision to be applauded, though with mixed feelings. The novel deserves to reach a wide readership, for reasons not entirely literary. By putting into the mouths of her characters explicit reference to these events, for using the word "genocide," Shafak fell afoul of Article 301 of the Turkish penal code and was tried on a charge of "insulting Turkishness," which carries a prison sentence. It is only a few months since this charge was finally dropped.
The case received wide press coverage both in the United States and in Europe and has served as a highly public and highly salutary example of the lengths to which an insensate nationalism can go in the suppression of elementary freedoms.
 It has also, of course, acted as an extreme example of the denial that is a central theme of the novel.However, a novel is first of all a structure of words, and it has to be said that the structure is sometimes shaky in this one. Certainly we British must be on our guard against looking upon the English language as the last of our colonial possessions, quite failing to notice that it was lost long ago under the combined assault of a billion or so people all over the globe who regard it as theirs too, and often use it more vividly and inventively than we do.
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