Elif Şafak is a Turkish writer and the best-selling female author in Turkey. She attended the Edinburgh book festival to discuss her new book ‘The forty Rules of Love. 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".