Orhan Pamuk

Origins and family

Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 into a wealthy but declining upper-class family. His father was an engineer, and the family lived in the westernised district of Nişantaşı, a setting that recurs in novels such as The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, and that he describes at greater length in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City. His paternal grandmother was Circassian.

Education

He attended the American Robert College secondary school in Istanbul and then began studying architecture at Istanbul Technical University, a subject linked to his original dream of becoming a painter. After three years he left to become a full-time writer, and in 1976 graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul, though he never practised journalism. From the ages of twenty-two to thirty he lived with his mother, writing his first novel and trying to find a publisher.

First novels

He had been writing regularly since 1974. His first novel, Karanlık ve Işık (Darkness and Light), shared the 1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest with Mehmet Eroğlu. It was published in 1982 as Cevdet Bey and His Sons and won the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize in 1983. It follows three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family in Nişantaşı. His second novel, Silent House (Sessiz Ev, 1983), won the Madarali Novel Prize in 1984. His international breakthrough came with The White Castle (Beyaz Kale, 1985), a historical novel that won the 1990 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction and that the American press hailed as the arrival of a new voice. Around this time he began experimenting with postmodern techniques, moving away from the strict naturalism of his early work.

New York and consolidation

From 1985 to 1988 he lived in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University while his wife, the historian Aylin Türegün, studied there. During this period he wrote The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990), one of the most controversial and popular books in Turkish literature because of its complexity and richness, and his first major international success. In 1992 he wrote the screenplay for the film Gizli Yüz, based on that novel and directed by Ömer Kavur. His fifth novel, The New Life (Yeni Hayat, 1994), caused a sensation in Turkey and became the fastest-selling book in the country's history.

My Name Is Red and later works

His reputation was firmly established with My Name Is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı, 1998), set in sixteenth-century Istanbul during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III. The novel blends mystery, romance and philosophical puzzles, opening a window onto the tension between East and West. It has been translated into twenty-four languages and in 2003 won the International Dublin Literary Award. He then published Snow (Kar, 2002), set in the border city of Kars, which explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey. The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008) was the first novel he published after receiving the Nobel Prize. He created an actual museum of the objects in the novel in a house in Istanbul he purchased for the purpose, opened in 2012 in the Cihangir district. In essays and memoirs such as Other Colors (1999) and Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), he reflected on his native city and his own life.

Style and ideas

His books are marked by a confusion or loss of identity brought on partly by the clash between Western and Eastern values. They tend to have complex plots and characters and are full of discussion of the arts, such as literature and painting. Many of his novels tell tragic love stories in which educated men fall for beautiful women and seem doomed to a decaying loneliness. Pamuk describes himself as a Cultural Muslim, identifying with Islam historically and culturally while not believing in a personal connection to God. He speaks of inspiration as an inner music whose mystery he does not wish to fully understand.

Controversy and trial

His civic stance on human rights, particularly on the Armenian and Kurdish questions, has made him a polarising figure in Turkey, where some admire him and others consider him a traitor. In 1995 he was among a group of authors tried for essays critical of the government's treatment of the Kurds. In February 2005, in an interview with the Swiss magazine Das Magazin, he referred to a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds killed in the country. He was prosecuted for insulting Turkishness under Article 301 of the penal code. After a hate campaign that forced him to leave the country, he returned to face the charges. In January 2006 the Justice Ministry declined to authorise the prosecution and the case was dropped, although in 2011 a court ordered him to pay compensation for having insulted the honour of the plaintiffs. After the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007 he left the country again; some Turkish media accused him of exploiting the situation, and he returned to Istanbul in April of that year to write his next novel.

Nobel Prize and legacy

On 12 October 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy citing a writer who, in search of the melancholic soul of his native city, has found new symbols to depict the clash and interweaving of cultures. He is the first Turkish laureate. His works have been translated into more than forty languages, and his books have sold over thirteen million copies in sixty-three languages. He is Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature, and has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards around the world. In 2021 Turkish prosecutors opened a new investigation against him over a book.