Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952, is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the first Turkish Nobel laureate and one of Turkey’s most prominent novelists, with more than 13 million books sold in 63 languages, making him the country’s best-selling writer. His work belongs to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which his fiction often met questions of memory, identity, politics, and the pull between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey.

Pamuk grew up in a wealthy but declining upper-class family in Istanbul, an experience that appears in passing in The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, and more fully in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City. He attended Robert College in Istanbul and studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, a subject tied to his early dream of becoming a painter. After three years he left architecture school to write full time, later graduating from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976. From ages 22 to 30, he lived with his mother, wrote his first novel, and tried to find a publisher.

He began writing regularly in 1974. His first novel, first titled Darkness and Light, was a co-winner of the 1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest and was published in 1982 as Cevdet Bey and His Sons. It won the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize in 1983 and tells the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family in Nişantaşı, the district where Pamuk grew up. His early books brought more prizes, including the 1984 Madarali Novel Prize for Silent House and the 1991 Prix de la Découverte Européenne for its French translation. The White Castle, published in Turkish in 1985, won the 1990 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction and widened his reputation abroad.

As his fiction developed, Pamuk moved from the strict naturalism of his early work toward postmodern techniques. The Black Book, published in 1990, became one of the most controversial and popular books in Turkish literature. In 1992 he wrote the screenplay for Secret Face, based on that novel and directed by Ömer Kavur. The New Life, published in 1994, caused a sensation in Turkey and became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. My Name Is Red, published in 1998, blends mystery, romance, and philosophical puzzles in sixteenth-century Istanbul; it won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. Snow, published in 2002, follows Ka, an expatriate Turkish poet, through the border city of Kars and was listed by The New York Times as one of its Ten Best Books of 2004.

Pamuk’s public life has also been shaped by his willingness to write and speak about difficult historical and political events. By the mid-1990s he had become a high-profile figure in Turkey because of his support for Kurdish political rights, and in 1995 he was among authors tried for essays criticizing Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds. In 2005, a lawyer sued him over a statement acknowledging the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire; Pamuk said his intention was to raise issues of freedom of speech in Turkey. Beyond fiction, he has taught writing and comparative literature as the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018, and in 2019 exhibited more than 600 Istanbul photographs taken from his balcony. Readers return to Pamuk because his work stays close to human conflict, private memory, and the difficulty of understanding those who differ from us.