Elif Şafak

Four of her ten planets sit in air signs, three in water, two in fire and a single one in earth. Air is the element of the sentence set out and argued, which is the working material of a novelist, and it holds the largest share here. Şafak is a Turkish British novelist and the record says she writes in both languages.

The Sun sits on the second degree of Scorpio with Mercury and Venus further along the sign, three planets in the one that commits without announcing it. The Moon answers from Capricorn. Pluto sits on the first degree of Libra and Neptune on the second of Sagittarius. For a writer who works in two languages rather than translating between them, a Scorpio group holding identity, speech and taste describes somebody who decides privately which one a book belongs in.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Neptune at under a third of a degree and with Pluto at two thirds, so identity is on comfortable terms with both image and concentrated force. The Moon sits in mild friction with Mars at under a degree. Saturn alone was retrograde at her birth, and nothing in this chart forms a named pattern to hold any of it. For a novelist, identity at ease with both image and force is what lets a book be written from inside a difficult subject.

Jupiter stood again on its Sagittarius birth degree on 12 December 2018, at forty seven, which puts the planet of reach back in the sign it governs, and three circuits come before it. Sagittarius measures a thing by the ground it crossed, and for a novelist working across two languages and two countries the ground crossed is the measure the record already uses. One planet in earth, in a writer working across two languages, puts the discipline somewhere other than the elements. Her Moon in Capricorn is the one placement here that counts anything, and it sits in mild friction with Mars, so the counting is never quite comfortable. Three planets gathered in Scorpio, with identity at ease with both image and force, is a chart built to hold a great deal without showing much of it.