
Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the wealthy westernised district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the secular American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.
His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. It was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk and his wife went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and the French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk’s fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk’s daughter Rüya (which means “dream” in Turkish) was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a three-pages story in The Black Book. His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix du meilleur livre étranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003).
From the mid-1990s Pamuk took a critical stance towards the Turkish state in articles about human rights and freedom of thought, although he took little interest in politics. Snow, which he describes as “my first and last political novel” was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of “political novel”, telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. Snow was selected as one of the best 100 books of 2004 by The New York Times. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours. Pamuk’s book Istanbul, published in 2003, is a poetical work combining the author’s early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.
Orhan Pamuk whose books have been translated into 63 languages and sold 13 million copies (2 million in Turkey and 11 million internationally) holds honorary doctorates from many universities. In 2005 he was awarded The Peace Prize, considered the most prestigious award in Germany in the field of culture. The same year, Snow received the Le Prix Médicis étranger, an award for the best foreign novel in France. Also the same year, he was named among the world’s 100 intellectuals by Prospect magazine. In 2006, TIME magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world. Pamuk is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Chiese Academy for Social Sciences. He gives lectures once a year in Columbia University. Pamuk received the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Turkish person to receive the award. His Nobel lecture titled My Father’s Suitcase was published in 2007 with other texts by the author.
In 2008 Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence, a novel about the individual and social dimension of love, marriage, friendship and happiness. Pamuk’s second collection of essays was published in Turkey in 2010 under the title Fragments of the Landscape, while his Charles Norton Eliot lectures on the art of the novel, entitled The Naive and The Sentimental Novelist, were published in 2011. In 2012, Pamuk opened the Museum of Innocence itself in Istanbul. The catalogue of the museum, The Innocence of Objects, was published the same year. In the same year Pamuk also received Helena Vaz Da Silva European Award, an award which “acknowledges exceptional contributions to the communication on cultural heritage and European ideals”. 2013 saw the publication Ben Bir Ağacım (I Am a Tree), a collection of the best excerpts from his novels. In 2014, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence received the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) from the European Museum Forum. In 2014, Pamuk published A Strangeness in My Mind about the life of peddler and his family, a novel which he worked on for six years. In 2015, the novel won him two significant Turkish awards: the Aydın Doğan Foundation Award and the Erdal Öz Literary Prize. In 2016 Orhan Pamuk won The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award (from the Museum and Estate of Leo Tolstoy) for “Foreign Literature” with his novel A Strangeness in my Mind. The same year Pamuk published his tenth novel The Red-Haired Woman one of his most read and discussed works. A year later, it was translated to Italian and received a Lampedusa Award. This year, his latest novel Nights of the Plague was published in Poland by Wydawnictwo Literackie.