Court rules: Elif Shafak found guilty of plagiarism

Elif Shafak, a Turkish-British novelist and essayist, with around 19 published novels, most well known for her novels; The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), The Forty Rules of Love (2009), Three Daughters of Eve (2016), and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds This Strange World (2019) and more has recently been accused of plagiarising sections of her book, The Flea Palace (2002) from The Flies Palace (1990), the work of Turkish columnist and writer, Mine Kirikkanat. 

Over the last week, according to the Istanbul court case, she was accused of copying up to five percent of her best selling novel from Mine Kirikkanat's writing including ideas, characters, and settings. The court concluded that Shafak would need to compensate Kirikkanat with an amount of around TRY 160,000 (Turkish Lira), which roughly comes up to USD 5200, and publicly acknowledge her plagiarism in the country's leading newspapers. 

The court also ruled that the Türkiye-based Dogan Kitap Publishing House was liable for material compensation as well as moral damages.

Both stories, as explained by the court, are said to be "based around an apartment block with five floors and in both an architect emerges as one of the leading characters". (Soylu, 2024) as stated in Middle East Eye. Alongside, she was accused of plagiarising everything starting from the architectures, a doorman family who happened to have the same number of family members, characters who were trans and homosexual, and children who exhibited similar bodily defects.

Determined to disprove the allegations against her, Shafak immediately deemed the allegations to be "insane smears". She decided to appeal this decision, with the intention to sue Kirikkanat for the damage to her reputation, as explained during a formal statement given on Wednesday. 

This was not Shafak's first run in with the court. As one of Turkey's best-selling novelists who has made a considerable impact on the literary world, her name tends to be frequently associated with controversies in Turkey. With another case after the publication of her book, The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) that earned her the accusation of "insulting Turkishness" due to a character acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, the charges of which were later dropped. And another investigation that was launched against her, alongside other novelists, for her description of child abuse and sexual violence in her novels Three Daughters of Eve (2016) and The Gaze (1999). 

During this recent plagiarism judgement, Shafak also mentioned that the opinions of many experts—respected novelists—who claimed there was no plagiarism, were completely disregarded. This included the comments as reported by Middle East Eye, of Ulker Gokberk, a retired literature professor who reinforced the importance of the uniqueness of both books and how the narrative techniques and other tools used by Shafak is evidence in itself of its originality.