Elif ?afak

Elif ?afak Instagram – “Do you ever find yourself wondering if a beloved author or poet were alive today, what would she or he say about the state of our world? There are a number of names that keep coming to my mind, particularly these days: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gustave Flaubert, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Mahmoud Darwish… I’d so love to hear their voices and listen to their much-needed wisdom with regard to the present moment. What would they advise us?
In a few days we will celebrate the 144th birthday of Virginia Woolf. Hence, it is a good time to apply this question to her, for Woolf was not only a remarkable novelist but also a brilliant thinker, a public intellectual who sincerely cared about and openly responded to the brokenness of her times. Remember these words, which were so radical back then, and remain so still: “As a woman I have no country.
As a woman I want no country.
As a woman, my country is the whole world.” My new essay on Substack #writersandpoets join for free #unmappedstorylands 📚📚📚 | Posted on 24/Jan/2026 20:36:53