S7 Ep7: Bookshelfie: Elif Shafak
Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast
Empowering Women's Writing
In Turkey, women are traditionally seen as oral storytellers and associated with emotions, whereas the novel genre, considered more cerebral for discussing ideas, is mostly associated with men. Despite women being prominent fiction readers in Turkey, there exists a hierarchy where women read and men write. There is a lack of encouragement for women to write down their stories and when they do, their work is often not reviewed and judged on par with male writers. Women writers are expected to focus on 'womenly' issues like marriage and domestic life, leading to their writing being labeled as less intellectual compared to men. The speaker challenges this perception and advocates for recognizing women as powerful storytellers who can contribute intellectual works, highlighting writers like Virginia Woolf as examples of intellectual female writers.
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