Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952, Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish novelist who has lived and worked in Istanbul throughout his life, with extended periods in the United States. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University before transferring to and graduating from the Institute of Journalism at Istanbul University. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

His early novels — Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985) — established his themes of East-West encounter, historical memory, and the tensions within Turkish modernity. The Black Book (1990) used Istanbul's labyrinthine character as a structure for an investigation of identity and imitation. My Name Is Red (1998), set in the Ottoman miniature-painting workshops of the sixteenth century, received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and brought him to broad international recognition. Snow (2002), a political novel set in the eastern city of Kars, addressed Islamism, secularism, and the condition of women in contemporary Turkey. The Museum of Innocence (2008) accompanied the creation of a physical museum of the same name in Istanbul — a collection of objects belonging to the novel's fictional characters — that opened in 2012. Following his Nobel Prize, his public statements in defense of freedom of expression — including a 2005 newspaper interview in which he mentioned the deaths of Armenians and Kurds — led to a criminal prosecution in Turkey that attracted international attention.