Pamuk has also taken on taboo topics in Turkey, like the alleged Armenian genocide in the 1900s and the massacre of Kurdish separatists. It tackles the tension between Islamists, secularists, Kurds and nationalists in Turkey. The mix of influences and culture is something that Pamuk touches upon often in his work.īetween “The Museum of Innocence” and the 1998 novel “My Name is Red” – which first brought him international acclaim – Pamuk published what he says is his “first and last political” novel, entitled “Snow”. “But on the other hand, our class, history, religion, culture… all forms various ways we enjoy love or suffer for love.” I thank God that I’m alive, I can continue to write my books and can raise my voice and criticize the government. “(The book) treats loves as a general thing it’s something that happens to all of us, or most of us,” he says sitting among the relics of the fictional relationship. It centers around the relationship between wealthy businessman Kemal and a young woman called Fusan.įew authors would be able to physically create the world crafted between their pages, yet Pamuk’s remarkable Museum of Innocence opened in Istanbul in 2012, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

The single-minded 62-year-old examined the vagaries of love and obsession in his 2008 novel “The Museum of Innocence”. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author, is neither afraid to confront the human condition in his novels, nor his country’s past and political present.

Istanbul orhan pamuk