Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk has been published four times in Granta.
Photograph by Maka Gogaladze
‘Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence.’
Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk has been published four times in Granta.
Photograph by Maka Gogaladze
‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
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
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.
More about the author →‘In the part of the world where I come from, Europe is not just an ideal and a beautiful dream’ Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.
‘For the last thirty years I've been keeping track of the ships that sail through the Bosporus.’
Photographer Stephen Gill, whose photo-book Please Notify the Sun came out in 2021, speaks to Granta.
‘The fact that you exist means that you have a story that's worth telling’
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