Pamuk, Orhan

Pamuk, Orhan (1952- ), novelist, who in 2006 became the first Turkish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk is a bestselling author in his native country, and his work has been translated into more than 40 languages. His novels, often postmodernist in style, and both historical and contemporary in setting, typically examine the contradictions of a nation poised uneasily between Islam and secularism, the Middle East and Europe, and tradition and modernity. A charge of insulting Turkishness was brought against Pamuk in 1995 by the Turkish authorities after he controversially drew attention to the persecution of Armenians and Kurds by the Turkish state; the case was later dropped.

He was born on June 7, 1952, in İstanbul. His grandfather had made the family fortune through engineering in the 1930s, but at the time of Pamuk’s growing up, this considerable wealth had waned. Nevertheless, Pamuk attended the private Robert College American school in İstanbul. He first leaned towards the arts, but in line with family expectations, studied architecture at İstanbul Technical University. After three years, however, he gave this up to become a writer.

Pamuk’s first novel, the multi-generational family saga Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (1982; Cevdet Bey and His Sons), was published as a result of his winning the Milliyet Press Novel Contest in 1979, and went on to win the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize. His second novel, Sessiz Ev (1983; The House of Silence, 1998), won the Madarali Novel Prize.

He first came to international notice with the publication of his third novel, Beyaz Kale (1985; The White Castle, 1992), the story of a young Venetian in 17th-century İstanbul who is sold by pirates to his doppelgänger, a Turkish scholar eager for enlightenment about the advances of Western civilization. The book drew comparisons with Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. This fascination with doubling was also central to his next novel, Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1995), in which a lawyer impersonates a renowned journalist while searching for his lost wife in contemporary İstanbul. Yeni Hayat (1994; The New Life, 1996) is an allegorical tale of a man whose life is transformed after he reads a mysterious book, while Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998; My Name is Red, 2001) is a murder mystery set in the milieu of Islamic miniaturist painters to the 16th-century Ottoman court; the latter won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In Kar (2002; Snow, 2004), a poet visits a remote town that is cut off by snow from the rest of the country at the time of a military coup. He also wrote the memoir İstanbul—Hatiralar ve Şehir (2003; İstanbul—Memories of a City, 2005).