Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is one of the most important writers of this moment, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work  has been translated into 63 languages and over 15 million copies have been sold. Pamuk grew up in Istanbul, where he continued to study Architecture and Journalism. His childhood in the city plays an important role in several of his works, including his first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982). Although his debut earned him critical acclaim in Turkey, Pamuk made his international breakthrough with The Black Book in 1990. Since then he had published many novels and essays, such as My Name is Red (1998), Other colors (1999), Snow (2002) and most recently Nights of Plague (2002), for which he received numerous prizes. In 2006, Pamuk was the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in 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 Pamuk’s work.