This much I know: Elif Shafak, novelist, 53

My earliest memory is in a flat full of leftists in Strasbourg reading Marx, smoking, talking about revolution. My father was a graduate student there; my mother had dropped out of university, mistakenly thinking love would be enough. I remember the light, the mood, the cigarettes.

I was disconnected from my father. When my parents separated, he stayed in France and remarried. My mother brought me to Turkey. I was never invited to his house. We share a scholarly way of thinking, but emotional intelligence not so much.

Ankara was very conservative. Usually women in my mother’s situation married someone older. But my grandmother, who was pulled out of school for being a girl, encouraged my mother to go back to university. From my grandmother, I gained my love of oral storytelling. From my mother, my love of written culture.

For me writing is transcendental. I thought life was boring and I didn’t fit in. Constantly talking to imaginary characters, I started making up stories to transcend the little box I was put into, to dismantle those walls and see what was beyond.

We learn from differences. It pains me that diversity has become a negative word, because of populist, jingoistic winds. London is my home, but I have lived in Turkey, Madrid, Jordan, America, Germany. Cosmopolitan encounters change us.

Stationery is my obsession. I have too many notebooks and fountain pens. Only, I rarely write longhand. I am left-handed, but was trained out of that at school and I still struggle to hold a pen.

Go where a story takes you, without fear. I have written about genocide, sex workers and gender violence. In Turkey, I was put on trial for my writing. It was very Kafkaesque. The prosecutor asked for three years in prison. Surreally, my lawyer had to defend my fictional characters. Ultra-nationalists burned my image in the street. I was pregnant, it was stressful. I was acquitted, but I had to have a bodyguard.

Postpartum depression taught me that we have multiple sides to our personality. The part of me that was intellectual was my priority; the part of me that was more maternal, I looked down on. I’ve learned to value her more.

The certainty of extreme religiosity or atheism scares me. I like it when doubt and faith talk to each other. I feel closer to agnostics and mystics who walk a thin line between faith and doubt.

Water connects us with nature and each other. We take it for granted, but it is a finite resource: rivers are dying, sea levels rising. The same water has circulated throughout history. What we shed as tears is the same water you find in the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Thames and the Euphrates.

Writers are the memory-keepers of their age. A novel is always political. You have to respond to this moment in time.

Heavy metal feels honest. Like life, it is dialectical. When I write, I put on my headphones, find a song that speaks to me and listen to it 70-90 times. That loop helps me to zoom in and out. I like Sleep Token, Bring Me the Horizon, Arch Enemy, Amon Amarth, Nightwish. People think metalheads are violent, but they tend to be the gentlest of souls.

Introverts are misunderstood. My natural habitat is a small room full of books. I am happy in my solitude. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like human beings. I just need my own space, that’s all.

Photograph by Pål Hansen

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is published by Penguin. Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £9.99. Delivery charges may apply.