Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006, Orhan Pamuk is a gifted Turkish novelist who has spent most of his life living in Istanbul. Pamuk was born in 1952 to wealthy parents, he has described his life in the captivating memoirs ‘Istanbul: Memories and the City’, translated in 2005 into English by Maureen Freely. After his schooling, Pamuk went on to study architecture. However he left the same in three years to become a full-time writer. He graduated in journalism in the year 1976. His first novel, published in 1979 was brought out in a translated 1982 version titled Mr. Cevdet and His Sons. The book won the 1983 edition of the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize. His historic novel The White Castle that came out in its original Turkish version in 1985, won the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction. This book was the first one that established Pamuk’s reputation abroad. As the New York Times interpreted it, a new star of the literary world had risen in the east and his name was Orhan Pamuk. The Black Book, a 1991 novel, described as rich and complex was a major draw among readers and critics alike for the controversy it raised and also for the intricate writing. In 1999, Pamuk published his book of essays called Other Colours. He also grabbed attention by supporting Kurdish political rights during the same time period – starting 1995. Pamuk’s reputation as a writer continued to grow in the west with the release of the translated My Name is Red in 2000. For Pamuk it was the 2002 novel Kar that came out in 2004 in its English translation – Snow that further added to his fame as a master storyteller. The book was about the clash of western and Islamic principles in the city of Kars, even as snow falls down and shuts out the city from the rest of the world. The writing was poetic yet restrained and the subject was immediate. As the first lines of the book go: The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus-driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him ‘the silence of snow’. Ever since Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, his books have sold over 200,000 copies. Among all Nobel-prize winning authors, he is the bestselling of the lot in Sweden. Orhan Pamuk, who divorced from his forst wife in 2001, admitted to a relationship with Man Booker Prize winning author Kiran Desai in January 2010.