Orhan Pamuk

Nobel Prize in Literature 2006

Orhan Pamuk was born on June 7, 1952, in Istanbul, into a prosperous Turkish middle-class family. He graduated in Architecture from Istanbul Technical University and in Journalism from Istanbul University, but never practiced either profession. Between 1985 and 1988 he lived in the United States of America where he attended Columbia University in New York and also the University of Iowa for a short period of time. He currently lives in Istanbul.
In his native country, Pamuk is a renowned commentator, although he defines himself primarily as a fiction writer without political commitments. Some of the positions he has publicly taken have earned him the title of... persona non grata for some of his countrymen. He was the first author in the Islamic world to openly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and for publicly supporting the Turkish writer Yasar Kemal when he was tried and convicted by Turkish authorities in 1995. Pamuk himself was prosecuted for "open insult to the Turkish nation" after stating, in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed in Turkey. The complaint, which generated international protests, was eventually withdrawn in early 2006.