On 22 September 1994, the famous Palestinian intellectual Edward Said delivered the very first Nexus Lecture, thereby marking the birth of the Nexus Institute. Thirty years later, on the occasion of this special birthday, the Turkish writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk deliveredthe Nexus Lecture 2024 in Rotterdam.

Pamuk is one of the most imporant writers of this moment, who with his oeuvre follows in the footsteps of giants like Lev Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. His books have been translated into 63 languages and over 15 million copies have been sold. Contemporary classics such as My Name is Red (1998), Snow (2002) and A Strangeness in My Mind (2014) earned him numerous prizes. In 2006, Pamuk was the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Committee praised him for ‘discovering new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’ in his ‘quest for the melancholic soul in his native city’. The tension between Western and Eastern values has been an overarching theme in his work. During his Nexus Lecture 2024, Pamuk spoke about the multifaceted nature of European culture, represented in novels and museums by individual stories.

Photos: Rene Castelijn

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