Orhan-Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

 　　On June 7, 1952, Orhan-Pamuk was born into a prosperous middle-class secular family in Istanbul. His father, uncle and grandfather were all engineers. It was the grandfather who created the family's wealth. Growing up, Orhan-Pamuk was encouraged to be a painter. After graduating from Robert College, Orhan-Pamuk studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. From 1985 to 1988, Orhan-Pamuk was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York, USA, and visited the University of Iowa for a short time. Orhan-Pamuk lives in Istanbul.

　　Orhan-Pamuk has said that as he grew up, he experienced a transition from a traditional Turkish family environment to a more Western lifestyle. He wrote this in his first novel, a family chronicle called Cevdet Bey Ve Ogullarl (1982), which, in the spirit of Thomas Mann, traces a family over three generations development process.

　　His second novel, The House of Silence (1983), used five different narrative perspectives to describe a situation in Turkey teetering on the brink of civil war, in which several members of the novel's family travel to a fashionable the seaside resort to visit their elderly grandmother. It was 1980. These grandchildren's political discussions and their friendships reflect the chaos of a society where extremist groups vie for power.

　　Orhan-Pamuk's international reputation came from his third novel, The White Castle (1985). The work is structured as a historical novel set in 17th century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story about how our selves are constructed on different kinds of stories and fictions. Personality is presented as a mutable construct. The protagonist of the story, a Venetian, is sold to a young scholar Hogja, and in Hogja he finds his own reflection. As the two men recount their life experiences to each other, their identities also swap. Perhaps, on a symbolic level, European fiction captures and associates with foreign cultures.

　　Orhan-Pamuk's writing is known for its use of identity and duality. This theme appears in the novel The Black Book (1995). In the novel, the protagonist explores the shouting of Istanbul for his vanished wife and half-brother, with whom he swaps identities. Given the frequent reference to the mystical traditions of the East, it is natural to see this work from the perspective of Islamic Sufism. The Black Book represents a clear break with the realist style of Turkish literature that dominates society.

　　A New Life (1994) is a novel about a mysterious book that has the power to irreversibly change the life of anyone who reads it. The pursuit of the book provides a structure for the novel to travel naturally, while the strong connection to literary allusions, thought experiments and nostalgia for old-fashioned Turkish pop culture in the spirit of mysticism transforms the plot into an allegorical event. process. These events are closely related to a romantic myth about a primitive and lost wisdom.

　　According to the author, My Name is Red (2000) is about the relationship between East and West, and the work describes different perspectives on the relationship between an artist and his work in both cultures. It's a story about Islamic miniatures and a murder mystery, a sweet love story, and a nuanced but dialectical discussion of the role of individuality in art.

　　Orhan-Pamuk has published a collection of essays, Oteki Renkler: Secme Yazllar Ve Bir Hikaye (1999), and the urban portraiture Istanbul: Memory and City (2003). The latter interweaves the writer's upbringing and describes Istanbul's literary and cultural history. The key word in the work is "huzun," a multifaceted concept Orhan-Pamuk uses to describe melancholy, which he believes is characteristic of Istanbul and its inhabitants.

　　Orhan-Pamuk's latest novel is Snow (2002). The background of the story is in the 1990s, a town called Kars near the eastern border of Turkey, which used to be a border city between Turkey and Russia. The protagonist of the story, a writer who has been exiled in Frankfurt, comes to Karls to find himself and his country. While the novel continues to describe the political and religious conflicts in Turkish society today, the work becomes a creative saga about love and poetry.

　　In Orhan-Pamuk's country, he has earned a reputation as a social critic, even though he sees himself primarily as a writer with no political future. He was the first writer in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the trial of Salman Rushdie. When his Turkish colleague Kommer was tried in 1995, he sided with Kommer. He was charged with mentioning in a Swiss newspaper that 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in Turkey. The allegation sparked widespread protests from the international community and was subsequently dropped.