Elif and Sarah’s conversation will begin at 6:45pm but please join us from 6pm for music from Our HeartBeats.

Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet at the heart of Ella’s life is an emptiness which was once filled by love.

After reading a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and his forty rules of life and love, Ella is compelled to embrace change. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author, a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella, and Shafak’s readers, into a faraway world where faith and doubt are heartbreakingly explored. The Forty Rules of Love is a mesmerising tale of discovery, language, truth and love itself. It was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped Our World.

Whether you’ll be revisiting the novel, or discovering it for the first time, join us for this special and intimate event, where Elif will be in conversation with publisher, curator and writer Sarah Shin.

Opening and closing the event, we will hear DJ sets from Our HeartBeats inspired by the themes of The Forty Rules of Love. Our HeartBeats is a transformative initiative from Counterpoints Arts, designed to empower individuals from sanctuary-seeking backgrounds through DJing skills, creativity, community and mental health support,

Event Schedule

6pm – House opens, DJ set, drinks available from our cash bar, books available from Stanfords

6:45pm – Conversation between Elif Shafak and Sarah Shin begins

7:45pm – DJ set, drinks available from our cash bar, books available from Stanfords book signing with Elif Shafak

8:30pm – Event ends

Speakers:

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish writer, whose work has been translated into 58 languages. The author of 20 books, 13 of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as the British Book Awards and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick. Her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize, and was a Blackwell’s Book of the Year. The Architect’s Apprentice was chosen for The Queen’s Reading Room book club.

Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. Shafak is a fellow and a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature and has been chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women. An advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice TED Global speaker. She has been awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in 2024, was awarded the British Academy President’s Medal for ‘her excellent body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range’.

Sarah Shin explores dreams, myth, cosmic speculation and transformation through writing, research, publishing, curation and creation. Her current collaborations include: with Irene Revell, the Bodies of Sound book and curatorial project; with Sammy Lee, Mirror, a video game that journeys through a mythical world of correspondences; and Concrete Poetry with Mark Lowe. She is a founder of Silver Press, the feminist publisher, and Spiral House, a new imprint for art, poetry and ways of knowing; Ignota, the creative publishing and curatorial house that closed in 2024; New Suns literary festival at the Barbican Centre; and Standard Deviation, a multidisciplinary collective exploring the coincidence of psychic, geometric and inhabited spaces.