Snow

Snow is a novel by Orhan Pamuk, first published in Turkish in 2002 and translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2004. The book draws on many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and takes as its starting point a real epidemic of suicides among teenage girls in the city of Kars, near the borders with Armenia and Georgia.

Its protagonist, Ka, is a poet who returns to Turkey after twelve years of political exile in Germany. Sent to Kars to report on the suicides, which are linked to the ban on wearing the headscarf, he finds a town cut off by snow, marked by distrust and growing radicalisation. There he reunites with İpek, whom he once loved, and watches violence break into public life when an Islamist extremist assassinates the director of the local Institute of Education.

The novel interweaves its narrative with the poems Ka begins to write again after years of creative block, including the one that gives the book its title. A narrator who appears in the story as a friend of the protagonist reconstructs events from his diary and correspondence, sometimes revealing what Ka does not yet know.

The novel was widely acclaimed and won the Prix Médicis étranger in 2005, and it was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It is often read as a meditation on identity, religion, secularism and the role of the writer in a divided society.