Set in Cyprus and London and spanning a lifetime, The Island of Missing Trees is the new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World, Elif Shafak.

Following the lives of two teenagers from opposite sides of a divided island, it tells a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

Elif Shafak and acclaimed writer and artist Edmund de Waal for this special event at The Conduit’s new home in Covent Garden. They explore the book and its related themes of human connection, the inheritance of pain, the power of kindness and the role of literature in giving a voice to the natural world.

Speakers:

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into 54 languages. The author of 19 books, 12 of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s 2019 novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year. Her previous novel, The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. This year, Shafak’s The Architect’s Apprentice was chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall’s inaugural book club, The Reading Room.

Edmund de Waal CBE is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum, The Frick Collection and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, won the RSL Ondaatje prize and the Costa Biography Award, was named as one of the books of the decade by the Sunday Times and of the 21st century by the Guardian. It was the Independent Bookseller Book of the Decade and has been translated into 29 languages. In 2015 he was awarded the Windham-Campbell prize for non-fiction by Yale University. The White Road, a journey into the history of porcelain, was published to great acclaim in 2015.  Edmund will present a major new exhibition this autumn at the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, inspired by his latest book Letters to Camondo.

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