Orhan Pamuk received a journalism degree from the University of Istanbul in 1977. He first won international acclaim for his third novel, The White Castle, published in 1985. After making statements about his country’s massacre of Armenians and Kurds, the novelist was put on trial in 2005 for “denigrating Turkishness.” The following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Miscellany
“In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” wrote Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City. “When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person.”
