Two of today’s most vital and highly regarded writers, together for the first time.

2023 saw author Sarah Bernstein named a Granta Best Young British Novelist and Booker shortlisted for Study for Obedience, the story of an unnamed Jewish woman’s move to the remote, unspecified country of her ancestors. And ahead of her highly anticipated 13th novel later this year, internationally bestselling The Island of Missing Trees author Elif Shafak, herself a 2019 Booker nominee and Blackwell’s Book of the Year winner with 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, returns to the festival.

Buy a copy of The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak .

This event will last approximately 1 hour, without an interval.

About the Speakers:

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into fifty-five languages. The author of nineteen books, twelve of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was a top ten Sunday Times bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Her previous novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to ‘the renewal of the art of storytelling.’

Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal, Quebec and lives in the Northwest Highlands, Scotland. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta and other publications in Canada and the UK. She teaches modern and contemporary literature at Strathclyde University. Her first novel The Coming Bad Days was published in 2021, and her poetry collection Now Comes the Lightening was published in 2015. Study for Obedience won the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.