Interview | Orhan Pamuk | Granta Magazine

Orhan Pamuk | Interview

Orhan Pamuk & John Freeman

‘Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence.’

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

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John Freeman

John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman's and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the author and editor of eleven books, including Dictionary of the Undoing; There's a Revolution Outside, My Love (co-edited with Tracy K Smith), and Wind, Trees, a new collection of poems. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and been translated into more than twenty languages. Once a month he hosts The California Book Club, an online discussion of a classic book of golden state literature for Alta magazine. He lives in New York City.

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