Conversations with Orhan Pamuk

In over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a foremost practitioner of the global novel today. His work, informed by Turkish and world literary canons, has been translated into over sixty languages and sold over fifteen million copies globally.

This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author’s oeuvre. As the interviews show, Pamuk’s work makes allusions to literary texts from Eastern and Western traditions in a hybrid manner. Furthermore, Pamuk writes on the fault line between historical and literary idioms, playing with genres like a painter does with colors, interweaving romance, detective story, murder mystery, mythology, and autobiography. The interviews establish that a Pamuk novel is predicated on methodical research, at times archival and scholarly, investigative and journalistic, or ethnographic. One could say the Pamuk novel is method. His fictions are constructed through intricate clockwork and delve into, for example, specialized knowledge of an Ottoman historical era, Islamic miniature painting, coups, museums, Istanbul street vendors, conspiracy, and plagues. Pamuk’s interviews, in turn, are necessarily instructive and edifying as much as they are entertaining, opening windows onto the novelist's everyday life, craft, and process.