I believe that if we can dream in more than one language then, yes, we can also write in more than one language — Elif Shafak
Living abroad forces you into a strange, beautiful, and sometimes paralyzing limbo. You speak two languages, but you constantly find yourself trapped at the border between them—thinking in Italian but speaking in English, or drafting a thought in English only to speak it in Italian. It is a constant, exhausting internal mess.
This friction gets louder every time I try to create something new. I find myself debating with my own reflection: is it better to write this in English or Italian? Which version of me wins? It feels like there is never a clear answer.
When I wrote my first novel, I chose Italian. I felt fluid, safe, and deeply rooted in my native tongue. But I was writing this deeply personal book here in London, completely disconnected from the city outside my window. I couldn't share a single page with the world around me, and that left me feeling profoundly isolated.
In the middle of that silence, I reached out to Silvia Spanò. She is a brilliant Italian author, and we had worked together over ten years ago. When I messaged her to confess that I was writing a novel, her warmth was a lifeline. Through an endless exchange of WhatsApp messages, she didn't just give me invaluable advice on the craft—she did something much bigger. She made me feel like I belonged. She made me feel like an author, like someone whose voice deserved a tiny bit of consideration from this world.
But that validation only made my urge to share my work with London grow stronger. As I neared the end of the manuscript, I seriously considered translating the entire book into English. It would have been a monumental task, costing me months of agonizing, frustrating labor.
In the end, I chose a different kind of courage: I decided to leave the novel in Italian. I realized I could either spend months looking backward, trapped in a translation, or I could use that exact same time to start writing something entirely new, in English, from scratch. I didn't want to paralyze my forward momentum. Maybe that first book just belonged to the Italian language, and that was okay.
For the first time, I saw that my two languages weren’t enemies fighting for control. They are simply two different channels for the same soul.
Relieved by this realization, I shared my thoughts with Caterina. By a beautiful twist of fate, she was sitting right there reading The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. She turned to the back of the book and read me a note the author had written about her own struggle of being Turkish and choosing to write in English.
Hearing those words in our living room was the final piece of the puzzle. It gave me the permission I had been denying myself.
This is what keeps me going despite my broken accent and enduring foreignism. I believe that if we can dream in more than one language then, yes, we can also write in more than one language.
Elif Shafak
