Ferit Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a famous novelist from Turkey. He was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family.He completed his graduation from American Robert College in Istanbul and later he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years. He was 23 when he decided to become a novelist.

He wrote many novels and his work has been translated into 46 languages including Japanese and French. In 2006, TIME magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential persons of the world and in the same year he was awarded with Nobel Prize in Literature.



His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel won both the Milliyet literary and Orhan Kemal prizes. The following year Pamuk published his another novel The Silent House, the French translation of thais novel won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene award. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. His novel The Black Book novel was published in 1990, and the French translation of this won the Prix France Culture.

In 2008 Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence, a novel about a man’s lifelong infatuation with a young woman and his attempt to build a museum housing the objects associated with his love. Pamuk opened the museum itself in 2012 in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul. The catalogue of the museum, The Innocence of Objects, was published the same year. Pamuk’s second collection of essays was published in Turkey in 2010 under the title of Fragments of the Landscape, while his Charles Norton Eliot lectures on the art of the novel, entitled The Naive and The Sentimental Novelist, were published in 2011.



Apart from three years in United States, Orhan Pamuk has spent all his life in the same streets and district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised. Pamuk has been writing novels for 30 years and never done any other job except writing.