The White Castle (1985)
A Venetian scholar enslaved in seventeenth-century Istanbul and his Ottoman master, Hoja, who looks exactly like him, exchange identities
Literature · Novelists
Orhan Pamuk
born 1952 · Turkish
Contemporary Turkish fiction
Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish writer to do so. His novels circle Istanbul and the tension between East and West: an Ottoman murder mystery narrated in turn by a corpse, a gold coin and a dog; a snowbound eastern city where an exiled poet walks into a coup; and a love story with a real museum attached to it. In 2005 he was prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness" after speaking publicly about the Armenian genocide.
How to spot them
- ▸Istanbul, and his word for its collective melancholy, hüzün
- ▸The first Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2006
- ▸Ottoman miniature painting, doubles and impostors, East against West
- ▸Prosecuted under Article 301 for remarks about the killing of Armenians and Kurds
- ▸He built an actual museum in Istanbul to accompany one of his novels
Key works
The Black Book (1990)
Galip searches Istanbul for his missing wife and for his cousin, a newspaper columnist whose columns he begins to write
My Name Is Red (1998)
A murder among the Sultan's miniaturists in 1591, narrated by many voices including a corpse, a coin, a tree and a dog; it won the International IMPAC Dublin Award in 2003
Snow (2002)
Kar — the poet Ka returns from Germany to the eastern city of Kars to report on suicides among headscarved girls, and is caught in a theatrical coup
Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003)
Memoir and city portrait, organised around hüzün, the melancholy shared by a city living among the ruins of an empire
The Museum of Innocence (2008)
Kemal's obsession with his poorer cousin Füsun, told through the objects he steals; a real museum of those objects opened in Çukurcuma in 2012
A Strangeness in My Mind (2014)
Forty years of Istanbul's growth seen through Mevlut, who sells boza in the streets at night
Nights of Plague (2021)
An outbreak of plague in 1901 on the imaginary Ottoman island of Mingheria, and the birth of a nation
Key ideas
- Hüzün: a communal melancholy belonging to a whole city rather than an individual
- The double and the exchange of identity as a figure for Turkey between East and West
- The novel as museum: objects as the means of preserving a love affair and a lost Istanbul
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 7 June 1952 in Istanbul into a secular, westernised family; he studied architecture and then journalism
- •He wanted to be a painter until his early twenties, a decision described in Istanbul: Memories and the City
- •My Name Is Red won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003
- •In a 2005 interview with a Swiss newspaper he said that a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey, and was charged under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code; the charges were dropped in January 2006
- •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish laureate
- •He opened the Museum of Innocence in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul in 2012, displaying the objects described in the novel
- •The museum won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2014
- •He has taught at Columbia University in New York for many years
- •He has lived under police protection in Turkey following death threats
Drill it — 8 cards
1 / 8new card
Sources
- The Nobel Prize — Orhan Pamuk: Facts
- The Paris Review — Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction No. 187