Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most globally renowned writers, having been translated into over fifty languages, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and named a Chevalier of l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. As such, when she was accused and then indicted of plagiarism in 2021, it sent deep reverberations throughout the Turkish literary scene. In this following essay, Neriman Kuyucu Norman examines the details of the case against Shafak—and why it is always important to look beyond the surface representation of such matters.
On October 19, 2021, Turkish author and columnist Mine Kırıkkanat filed a plagiarism lawsuit against the internationally acclaimed British-Turkish author Elif Shafak and her Turkish publisher Doğan Kitap. Kırıkkanat claimed that Şafak’s 2002 bestseller The Flea Palace (Bit Palas) was a structural copy of Kırıkkanat’s 1990 novel The Flies’ Palace (Sinek Sarayı). Last November, the 16th Civil Chamber of the Istanbul Regional Court of Justice issued a ruling concluding that the similarities found in Shafak’s novel went beyond mere inspiration.
The court’s ruling was based on a 35-page expert report that confirms the absence of any direct plagiarism of sentences or dialogue. Instead, the report identifies what it describes as a structural and thematic overlap, accounting for nearly 5% of the book. Based on this finding, the court ordered substantial penalties, including financial damages, a total market recall, and a ban on future printing. Doğan Kitap has formally contested these measures, claiming that both the publisher and Shafak will seek a reversal of the decision through the Supreme Court of Appeals.
Having recently read R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), which tackles the blurred boundaries between creative inspiration and intellectual theft, I found the court’s decision particularly compelling. The case against Shafak brings the core dilemma of Kuang’s narrative to the forefront: What constitutes plagiarism within the realm of creative writing? Can a concept or a literary idea ever truly be owned by a single person? How does public reaction recalibrate the parameters of intellectual theft?
Kırıkkanat’s Sinek Sarayı is a short, gritty story about Istanbul and its marginalized identities, grappling with the themes of urban alienation, belonging, and corruption. It follows Sinan, a French diplomat of Turkish origin at a crossroads, who retreats to the apartment of a close friend’s grandmother in Istanbul. Sinan’s interactions with the building’s residents, including a transgender woman, sex workers, and a doorwoman with dwarfism whose son has Down syndrome, instigate his inner journey. The novel pays homage to those relegated to the peripheries of the metropolis, and the old apartment itself serves as a microcosm of a fractured society.
Shafak’s Bit Palas similarly uses an apartment as a metaphor, in this case a historical Art Nouveau building in the city. The hefty novel offers intimate insight into the lives of its residents, most of whom exist on the margins of society. The primary common thread the characters share is the roof over their heads and the reality of the world beyond their threshold.
Stylistically, Shafak’s prose differs drastically from that of Kırıkkanat. Bit Palas moves through layers of history with a Márquezian sensibility: the world it creates and its characters are fully fleshed out. In contrast, Sinek Sarayı is a work of unembellished realism. It is sober, descriptive, and grounded in its portrayal of a decaying sociopolitical order. Despite the fundamental distinction between what I call the “souls” of the novels, the court’s verdict cited “a 5% similarity” based on character archetypes, such as the first-person narrator and specific eccentric figures, and the decay and smell of the building (flies vs. fleas/garbage) as a central metaphor for the corruption permeating the city. While the setting of an Istanbul apartment is a common literary device, Kırıkkanat’s claim hinges on a perceived constellation of details. The contention is that while the setting is public domain, it is statistically improbable for two authors to independently adopt titles that evoke a “Palace of Parasites” and include similar character pairings.
Before reading the novels comparatively and delving deeper into my research, I felt a sincere professional empathy for Kırıkkanat’s commitment to defending her intellectual property. The protection of creative labor is, after all, a fundamental principle of the craft. I have experienced the weight of this myself: I once discovered an academic paper that employed the specific sequence of primary sources and curated citations I had developed for my own published dissertation. While an official editorial investigation was eventually deemed inconclusive—categorizing the overlap as a “coincidence of shared research”—the sense of unease remained.
As a scholar of literature, however, I would argue that any characterization of these thematic overlaps as theft risks oversimplifying the complex process of creative writing and tradition. The heart of a novel lies in its prose, stylistic experimentation, and philosophical depth. If we applied the logic of this case to the global canon, James Joyce would have had grounds to sue Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner for adopting the stream-of-consciousness technique he helped pioneer, to give just one example.
In the field of literary studies, the phenomenon of narrative overlap is formally recognized as intertextuality, the understanding that no text exists in isolation; rather, literature is a continuous dialogue where writers, intentionally or subconsciously, echo, reference, and reshape the works of their predecessors. In the Turkish literary tradition, for instance, the transition from Ottoman-style wooden mansions to concrete apartment blocks in the modern era is a recurring theme that symbolizes the Westernization that Turkish society underwent in the twentieth century. In the global literary tradition, too, the “Apartment Novel” is a widely recognized genre, represented by works such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978) and Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2002).
“Scènes à faire,” a legal term used in copyright law, is further illuminating in this context. In an article called “Grounding the Scènes à Faire Doctrine,” the term is understood as the idea that “some elements in expressive works ‘must be done,’ or literally are the scenes ‘to do,’ and thus, may not be monopolized by any single author.” In other words, if you write a story about a haunted house, you will probably have a creaky door; if you write a Western, you will probably have a saloon and a cowboy. And if you write an “Apartment Novel” set in the heart of Istanbul, you will probably have metaphors for decay and stench, as well as a series of diverse, marginalized neighbors, which are details that belong to the collective tradition of the city’s (hi)story.
Despite these literary technicalities, I still empathized with Kırıkkanat’s position as a writer. Regardless of literary theories or the legal outcome, the perception that one’s creative blueprint has been appropriated must be a difficult sentiment to accept. But as I moved from the texts to the public discourse surrounding the case, specifically the commentary prevalent on social media platforms, my perspective shifted.
I observed that the conversation often abandoned the manuscripts altogether, shifting instead toward Shafak’s personal life and character. What began as a dispute over intellectual property appeared to be subsumed by the same deep-seated polarization that characterizes modern digital discourse. It became increasingly clear that in the media, the controversy was being perceived through an ideological lens rather than a literary one. To understand why this plagiarism case has elicited such a visceral public reaction in Turkey, one must look beyond the page and into the complex sociopolitical climate that continues to shape our cultural conversations.
Much of the public scrutiny directed at Shafak seems to stem from her personal and professional affiliations during her time in Turkey. Her husband, a journalist and former editor of Radikal, also held roles at outlets such as Zaman, a publication associated with the movement now officially designated by the Republic of Turkey as the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ). Following the 2016 coup attempt and the subsequent judicial measures taken against the organization’s network, Shafak’s husband left the country. Shafak, then, has become a symbolic target for those who view her as representative of an era that has since become a source of national trauma. What is often overlooked, however, is the sheer pervasiveness of that period’s institutional structure. These organizations infiltrated every facet of life, including education, culture, the judiciary, and the media. They managed some of the country’s most prestigious newspapers, NGOs, and academic institutions.
Like many liberal intellectuals during the early 2000s in Turkey, Shafak also contributed to Zaman at a time when the movement was an ally of the government and such platforms were widely presented as tools for democratization. It is thus intellectually disorienting to witness the current discursive effort to mobilize Shafak’s historical associations against her in a copyright dispute. The transition from literary analysis to ad hominem critique, specifically regarding choices made decades ago, raises a fundamental question: Is this truly a pursuit of intellectual property rights, or is it an ideological reckoning? In Shafak’s statement from 2024 (see the original Turkish version here) published as a response to the verdict, she framed the dispute not as a matter of literary theft, but as a symptom of personal hostility.
From the 2006 trial over her novel The Bastard of Istanbul to the persistent critiques of her status as a member of the “global elite,” Shafak is no stranger to the court of public opinion. To her detractors, she is often dismissed as a “project author,” a term used in Turkey to suggest that her international success is not a literary triumph, but a manufactured Western product (in a similar way that Malala is criticized as a “Western conspiracy” in Pakistan). Within this context, the public reception of the plagiarism case has added fuel to an old fire of cultural and ideological resentment.
Perhaps the real takeaway from this controversy is that we must stop letting social media and online discourse do our thinking for us. Before sharing a single headline or condemning a person’s character, we must return to the source. Read the books. Engage with the prose, analyze the structures, and reclaim our intellectual agency. In this strange age of rapid-fire opinions and “fake news,” the most radical act of resistance remains to be a truly critical reader.
Neriman Kuyucu Norman is a reader, writer, and researcher who teaches literature at Sabancı University, Istanbul. A specialist in postcolonial and diaspora literature, she is the author of Muslimness in Contemporary Literary Imaginations (Routledge, 2025), which examines the intersections of religion, migration, and identity in twenty-first-century women’s writing.
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