Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul into a prosperous, secular family whose fortune was gradually declining, and he has lived in the city most of his life. He was educated at Robert College and, wanting at first to be a painter, studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, leaving after three years to write full-time; he later graduated from the University of Istanbul’s institute of journalism. For years he lived with his mother and wrote, publishing his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, in 1982.

The White Castle (1985), about a Venetian scholar enslaved by an Ottoman master who comes to resemble him, brought his first international notice. The Black Book sent a lawyer through Istanbul in search of his missing wife and a columnist who may have taken his identity. My Name Is Red, a murder mystery among sixteenth-century Ottoman miniaturists, and Snow, set among Islamists, secularists and Kurds in the border city of Kars, made him widely read in translation. In Istanbul: Memories and the City he described the collective melancholy, hüzün, that he finds in the city’s ruins.

In 2005 he was prosecuted for remarks to a Swiss magazine about the killing of Armenians and Kurds; the charges were dropped the following year. He became the first Turkish Nobel laureate in 2006. His novel The Museum of Innocence (2008) was followed by a real museum of the same name in Istanbul, and he teaches at Columbia University.