Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter and academic, born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952. He abandoned architecture for writing and built his novels around the search for identity in the borderland between Eastern and Western values in his native city. His books have sold more than 13 million copies in 63 languages, making him Turkey's best-selling writer. In 2006 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first Turk to win a Nobel Prize — with the Swedish Academy praising him as a writer "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures". ^{1 2}

He was born in Istanbul and grew up in Nişantaşı in a wealthy but declining upper-class family of engineers — experiences he later described in his novels The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons and in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City. His paternal grandmother was Circassian. He was educated at Robert College, then studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years — from age seven to 22 he had wanted to be a painter — before abandoning it to write, and in 1976 he graduated from the Institute of Journalism at Istanbul University, never working as a journalist. From 22 to 30 he lived with his mother, writing his first novel and searching for a publisher. ^{2 3}

He began writing regularly in 1974. His first novel, Darkness and Light, shared the 1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest prize and was published in 1982 as Cevdet Bey and His Sons, winning the Orhan Kemal Prize in 1983; it traces three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family. There followed Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985) — which widened his reputation abroad and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1990 — and The Black Book (1990), one of the most controversial and popular books in Turkish literature, from which he wrote the screenplay for the 1992 film Secret Face. The New Life (1994) became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history to that point. ²

My Name Is Red (1998) blends murder mystery, romance and philosophical puzzles in 16th-century Istanbul under Sultan Murat III; it was translated into 24 languages and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2002 and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2003. Snow (2002), set in the border city of Kars, follows an exiled poet caught between Islamists and secularists, headscarf supporters and the authorities; the New York Times named it among its ten best books of 2004. His memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City appeared in 2003. ^{2 3}

His first post-Nobel novel, The Museum of Innocence (2008), was accompanied by an actual museum he created in an Istanbul house displaying the everyday objects associated with the story; it won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2014. Later novels include A Strangeness in My Mind (2014), The Red-Haired Woman (2016) and Nights of Plague (2021). His work is noted for a concern with the confusion and loss of identity between Eastern and Western values, for discussions of creative arts, and for openly used postmodern techniques and intertextuality. In 2019 he exhibited his photographs of Istanbul taken from his balcony: over 600 were chosen from 8,500 taken over five months. ²

He spent 1985–88 as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, where his wife was a graduate student, wrote much of The Black Book in its Butler Library, and held a visiting fellowship at the University of Iowa. He returned to Columbia as a visiting professor in 2006 and is now the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities there, teaching writing and comparative literature. He delivered Harvard's Norton Lectures in 2009, "The Naive and Sentimental Novelist", and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. ²

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006; his Nobel lecture was titled "My Father's Suitcase". His further non-fiction includes Other Colours (2007) and The Innocence of Objects (2012), on his museum. ^{1 2}

In February 2005 he told the Swiss magazine Das Magazin: "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." On a complaint by the lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, criminal charges were filed against him for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the penal code. Pamuk said his intention was to highlight Turkey's freedom-of-speech issues; a hate campaign forced him to flee the country temporarily, and he returned later in 2005 to face the charges. His trial opened on 16 December but was suspended for lack of the Justice Ministry's approval; on 29 December prosecutors dropped the separate charge of insulting the armed forces; and on 22 January 2006 the ministry refused approval, so the charges were dropped. His books were burned at a nationalist rally in Bilecik. Kerinçsiz appealed, the Court of Cassation ordered the case reopened at the Şişli court, and on 27 March 2011 a civil court found Pamuk guilty and ordered him to pay 6,000 liras in compensation to five people for insulting their honour, among other things. ²

The charges drew international protest: the European Parliament announced a trial-observer delegation; enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn called Pamuk's trial a "litmus test" of Turkey's commitment to the accession criteria; Amnesty International campaigned to scrap Article 301; and eight world writers — Saramago, García Márquez, Grass, Eco, Fuentes, Goytisolo, Updike and Vargas Llosa — issued a joint statement in his support. In January 2008 Turkish authorities arrested thirteen ultranationalists, Kerinçsiz among them, as members of the Ergenekon network accused of plotting assassinations and assassinations of prominent figures; subsequent reports suggested Pamuk had been among its targets, and police had informed him of assassination plans eight months earlier. ²

This section should be read as a report of different positions carried by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

His positions, as the sources report them: The Arabic article records that he was the first writer in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He supported the political rights of Turkey's Kurds, and in 1995 was among a group of authors tried for essays criticising Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish minority. He has described himself as a "Cultural Muslim" who associates with Islam historically and culturally while not believing in a personal connection to God; the Arabic article likewise says he does not believe in the existence of God and regards himself as a cultural Muslim only. ^{3 2}

Criticism directed at him: The nationalist historian Murat Bardakçı accused him in Hürriyet of counterfeiting and plagiarism, and one claim alleged that The White Castle contains exact paragraphs from Fuad Carim's novel. Asked at the 2009 Boston Book Festival whether he wished to respond, he said: "No I do not. Next question?" Many attributed such accusations to a misunderstanding of postmodern literature and of intertextuality, which Pamuk uses openly in his novels. ²

His elder brother Şevket Pamuk is a professor of Ottoman economic history at Boğaziçi University, and his half-sister Hümeyra Pamuk is a journalist. He married the historian Aylin Türegün on 1 March 1982; their daughter Rüya (her name means "dream" in Turkish, and My Name Is Red is dedicated to her) was born in 1991, and the couple divorced in 2002. From 2011 he was in a relationship with Aslı Akyavaş, whom he married in 2022. ²

His honours include the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2005), the Prix Médicis étranger for Snow (2005), a place in Time magazine's 100 most influential people (2006), Denmark's Sonning Prize (2012) and the French Legion of Honour as an officer (2012), in addition to many honorary doctorates from European and American universities. ²

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• The Arabic article dates the dropping of his prosecution to the end of 2006, while the English article fixes the Justice Ministry's refusal of approval at 22 January 2006; this article follows the English date and records the difference here. The Nobel facts page dates My Name Is Red to 2000 (its English edition), while the Turkish original is 1998, the date used here.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.