You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15, plus a free bottle of Paul Roger champagne if you go to spectator.com.

UK forward slash phys24. This offer is UK only and subject to availability.

Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectators' Food and Drink podcast. I'm Olivia Potts,

and today we are delighted to be joined by Aleph Shafak. Aloof is a novelist, political scientist and essayist.

She has published 21 books, 13 of which are novels, and her books have been translated into over 58 languages.

She's been shortlisted for the Costa Award, the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction,

and the British Book Awards, amongst many others. Her most recent novel, There Are Rivers in the

Sky, is published by Viking and Out Now. Elif, welcome to Table Talk. Thank you so much for having me.

So we're going to start where we always do at the very beginning and ask you, what are your

earliest memories of food? Oh, I'm really looking forward to this conversation because food also

plays a big, big role in my writing, in my fiction.

And what I realize as an author is when we talk about childhood memories, so much of

that is linked to food, essential. Isn't it? Smells and tastes and flavors. When I think of Istanbul, it always

comes to me with those flavors. And I think it has always intrigued authors, that connection

between memory and foods going all the way back to Proust, you know, the Madlan in your

cup of tea. So I find food incredibly important. But if I may

quickly add this, I think it's also a language. Food is how we communicate. So it's always much

more than appetite and filling up our bellies. It's much more than that. It's a culture,

it's history and it's a language.

You were brought up in France. Your parents are Turkish, but you were brought up initially in France.

How did that play into the things you ate when you were very young?

Well, I was born in Strasbourg, but shortly afterwards, my parents got separated and my father stayed in France and my mother brought me to Turkey, to Ankara.

...