After Pamuk's next novel, The New Life, another best seller, the success of My Name Is Red (1998) in Turkey resulted in an unusual offer for Pamuk: his government wanted to give him the title of state artist, a prestigious honor. Pamuk wrote it in the mid-1980s while living in New York City with his wife, who was pursuing a doctorate in history at Columbia University. Success and Rejected Accolades The White Castle was published in English the same year that Pamuk's fourth novel, The Black Book, appeared in Turkey. A year later, the novel reached the New York Times year-end list of the most notable books of 1991. The first of Pamuk's works to appear in English was The White Castle (1985), in 1990. After several years, he found a publisher for his first work, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), which became the first of his books to top Turkey's bestseller list. Pamuk earned a degree from the University of Istanbul's Institute of Journalism in 1976 and continued to work on his fiction. He spent much of that time writing and reading books from the Western world's most wellknown authors. Instead he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical College, but quit after three years.

As a child, the only time Pamuk ever visited a mosque was with a family servant, he told Fernanda Eberstadt in an interview that appeared in the New York Times: “It was a place where the servants met to gossip, and I was so Westernized I felt naked taking off my shoes.”Īrchitecture and Writing Pamuk dreamed of becoming an artist during much of his youth, but his family viewed this pursuit as impractical. Turkey emerged from World War II as an ally to the Western powers, and in the 1950s, a sweeping modernization, a booming economy, and a rising democracy party inspired a change in the country's identity as an Islamic, Arabic-world-allied state. Pamuk's mother came from a textile-manufacturing dynasty as a result, her family was part of the new, middle-class elite. Pamuk's father, a civil engineer by training, inherited his father's railroad company, but he and his brothers mismanaged the business, and their inheritance vanished in unwise real estate investments. He grew up in a family that began wealthy but lost much of its fortune by the time Pamuk reached adulthood.

Wealthy Beginnings and Western Influence Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1952. I care about writing.” Works in Biographical and Historical Context About his career, Pamuk has asserted, “I think less than people think I do about politics. He is an author shadowed by controversy and censorship, yet he has earned more than fifteen esteemed literary awards for works that have been translated into more than fifty languages.

Novelist Orhan Pamuk is the first Nobel laureate in literature from Turkey.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk