Freedom to read is imperiled in a world that is ill at ease with the idea of freedom...of thought, of feeling, of difference. No one knows this better than Elif Shafak, the Turkish author of 20 books translated into 50 languages. More than a decade ago, she moved from Turkey to the U.K. to find a home where she could write and think freely.

“It’s a very strange time to be alive. It’s a strange time to be a writer,” Shafak said, in the opening press conference of this year’s Fair. “In a world that remains deeply polarized and bitterly politicized and torn apart by inequality and wars and the cruelty that we are capable of inflicting upon each other... one might ask: ‘What can writers and poets even hope to achieve?’”

The author, whose works often explore themes of human rights, freedom of expression, and identity, emphasized the distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom in the digital age. “We live in a world in which we have way too much information, but little knowledge and even less wisdom,” Shafak observed. “And I think we need to change that ratio.”

Not too long ago, “the biggest optimists were the tech optimists” who promised that “information would be free.” But now we are drowning in information, but not emotion. “The only emotion that really, really frightens me is the lack of all emotions. It’s the absence of all emotions, which is numbness, which is apathy. And I believe this world we’re living in will become a much more dangerous and broken place if it becomes an age of apathy. The moment we stop writing and the moment we stop talking about what’s happening in Gaza today, what’s happening in Ukraine today, what’s happening in Sudan today, is the moment we become desensitized and atomized and indifferent and numb.”

Addressing the role of literature in this context, Shafak positioned writing as an act of resistance. “In the age of hyper information, instant gratification, fast transaction, and crowd distraction, I think literature has to be both an art form and an act of resistance,” she said. “Not resistance through force, but through its capacity to remind us of our shared humanity...the literary mind cannot be isolationist, it brings the periphery to the center.”