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In over thirty interviews conducted between 1982 and 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 books have been translated into over sixty languages and sold over fifteen million copies globally. The interviews in this volume open windows onto Pamuk's everyday life, craft, and process, constituting an alternative literary history that provides insights into the novelist's influences, method, form, and content. These conversations reveal that a Pamuk novel is predicated on methodical research, at times archival and scholarly, investigative and journalistic, or ethnographic. They are necessarily instructive and edifying as much as they are entertaining, providing a discursive space of literary history where writing, politics, and the everyday intersect and where the politics of literature can be located.
About the author
Erdağ Göknar is associate professor of Turkish studies at Duke University. He is translator of Pamuk's
My Name Is Red and author of
Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel. Pelin Kıvrak is a literary scholar and fiction writer. She worked in the creation of Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Istanbul and is editor of Pamuk's illustrated autobiographical book,
Uzak Dağlar ve Hatıralar ("Memories of Distant Mountains" ).
Summary
In over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author’s oeuvre.
