Elif Shafak — Inaugural Counterpoints Lecture: Art, Displacement, and Divided Worlds
Globally bestselling novelist Elif Shafak delivers the inaugural Counterpoints Lecture, exploring how artists displaced by war and extremism reshape collective understanding.
Why we picked this
Shafak has been targeted by the Turkish state for her writing — she is not speaking about displacement abstractly, and inaugurating a lecture series named after the plural, dissonant aesthetic of counterpoint gives this event a conceptual precision that distinguishes it from a standard Refugee Week talk.
Elif Shafak is one of the most widely read living novelists writing in English — her books have been translated into more than fifty languages and have reached tens of millions of readers worldwide. She has also lived the subject she will address at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: prosecuted in Turkey for “insulting Turkishness” over her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, she has navigated the specific condition of writing across cultures while knowing that political extremism has a direct stake in what she says and how she says it.
The Counterpoints Lecture — inaugurated at Southbank Centre’s Refugee Week 2026 under the theme of Courage — takes its name from the musical term for harmonically independent voices sounding together. Shafak will explore what that metaphor illuminates about artists who have been displaced by conflict and authoritarianism: how the experience of dislocation creates a particular kind of creative consciousness, one that holds multiple cultural frames simultaneously and refuses the simplifications that nationalism requires. Her question — whether that creativity can actively help heal divided worlds — is not rhetorical. It is a problem she has spent her career working on from the inside.
Refugee Week runs at Southbank Centre from June 26 to 28, 2026, anchored by the It Sounds Like Courage performance showcase in the Royal Festival Hall on June 26 (curated by Anoushka Shankar) and the Arab Film Club screening and Q&A in the Purcell Room on June 28. The Counterpoints Lecture stands as the intellectual centrepiece of the three-day programme.