Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of ten novels and the memoir Istanbul. One of Europe’s most prominent novelists, his work has been translated into over sixty languages. Pamuk’s novels are most frequently set in Istanbul – where the author was born and where he still lives – a bustling, vibrant, hybrid city, poised sometimes uncomfortably between Europe and the Middle East, history and modernity, Western-style liberalism and Islamic conservatism, adaptation and tradition. His fiction, much of which explores the fluidity of identity, is heavily influenced by both Western and Arabic literature. At once a local and a global writer, he has an enormous international readership.

Photograph © Hakan Ezilmez