Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, essayist and artist born in Istanbul in 1952. He initially studied architecture before completing a degree in journalism, but decided in his early twenties to devote himself to fiction. Istanbul—its streets, families, architecture and layered Ottoman and republican past—became the central imaginative setting of his work. Pamuk received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and became the first Turkish writer to win the award.

Pamuk’s novels include The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name Is Red, Snow, The Museum of Innocence, A Strangeness in My Mind and Nights of Plague. His historical fiction frequently examines encounters between Ottoman and European culture, particularly questions of art, identity, modernisation and the competing ways societies understand their past. My Name Is Red is set among miniature painters in sixteenth-century Istanbul, while The White Castle follows a Venetian captive and an Ottoman scholar, and Nights of Plague imagines an epidemic on an Ottoman island at the beginning of the twentieth century.