Biography of Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk (born on 7 June 1952 in Istanbul) generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk, is a Turkish novelist. He is also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing.
One of Turkey's most prominent novelists his work has sold over seven million books in more than fifty languages making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006—the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Turkish citizen.
Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a wealthy yet declining bourgeois family; an experience he describes in passing in his novels The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, as well as more thoroughly in his personal memoir Istanbul. He was educated at Robert College secondary school in Istanbul and went on to study architecture at the Istanbul Technical University since it was related to his real dream career, painting.He left the architecture school after three years, however, to become a full-time writer, and graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976. From ages 22 to 30, Pamuk lived with his mother, writing his first novel and attempting to find a publisher.
He is a Muslim, and he describes himself as a cultural one who associates the historical and cultural identification with the religion.
On 1 March 1982, Pamuk married Aylin Türegün, a historian. From 1985 to 1988, while his wife was a graduate student at Columbia University, Pamuk assumed the position of visiting scholar there, using the time to conduct research and write his novel The Black Book in the university's Butler Library. This period also included a visiting fellowship at the University of Iowa.
Pamuk returned to Istanbul, a city to which he is strongly attached. He and his wife had a daughter named Rüya born in 1991, whose name means "dream" in Turkish. In 2001, he and Aylin were divorced.
In 2006, Pamuk returned to the US to take up a position as a visiting professor at Columbia. Pamuk is currently a Fellow with Columbia's Committee on Global Thought and holds an appointment in Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department and at its School of the Arts.
In May 2007 Pamuk was among the jury members at the Cannes Film Festival headed by British director Stephen Frears. In the 2007-2008 academic year Pamuk returned to Columbia once again to jointly teach comparative literature classes with Andreas Huyssen and David Damrosch.
Pamuk is also currently a writer in residence at Bard College. He completed his latest novel, Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) in the summer of 2008 and the book was released in Turkey at 29th of August. The German translation will appear shortly before the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair where Pamuk was planning to hold an actual Museum of Innocence consisting of everyday odds and ends the writer has amassed (the exhibition will instead occur in an Istanbul house purchased by Pamuk). Plans for an English translation have not been made public, but Erdağ Göknar received a 2004 NEA grant for the project. His elder brother Şevket Pamuk - who sometimes appears as a fictional character in Orhan Pamuk's work - is a professor of economics, internationally recognized for his work in history of economics of the Ottoman Empire, working at Bogazici University in Istanbul. In autumn of 2009, Pamuk will be Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer, delivering a series of lectures entitled "The Naive and Sentimental Novelist".

Pamuk's Famous Novel Kars in 2002 (English translation, Snow, 2004), which takes place in the border city of Kars and explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey. The New York Times listed Snow as one of its Ten Best Books of 2004. He also published a memoir/travelogue İstanbul—Hatıralar ve Şehir in 2003 (English version, Istanbul—Memories and the City, 2005). Pamuk's Other Colours - a collection of non-fiction and a story - was published in the UK in September 2007. His next novel is titled The Museum of Innocence.
Asked how personal his book Istanbul: Memories and the City was, Pamuk replied:

I thought I would write Memories and the City in six months, but it took me one year to complete. And I was working twelve hours a day, just reading and working. My life, because of so many things, was in a crisis; I don’t want to go into those details: divorce, father dying, professional problems, problems with this, problems with that, everything was bad. I thought if I were to be weak I would have a depression. But every day I would wake up and have a cold shower and sit down and remember and write, always paying attention to the beauty of the book. Honestly, I may have hurt my mother, my family. My father was dead, but my mother is still alive. But I can’t care about that; I must care about the beauty of the book.

In 2005 Orhan Pamuk received the €25,000 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his literary work, in which "Europe and Islamic Turkey find a place for one another." The award presentation was held at Paul's Church, Frankfurt.
Pamuk's books are characterized by a confusion or loss of identity brought on in part by the conflict between Western and Eastern values. They are often disturbing or unsettling, but include complex, intriguing plots and characters of great depth. His works are also redolent with discussion of and fascination with the creative arts, such as literature and painting. Pamuk's work often touches on the deep-rooted tensions between East and West and tradition and modernism/secularism.

On 12 October 2006, the Swedish Academy announced that Orhan Pamuk had been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature, confounding pundits and oddsmakers who had made Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis, a favorite. In its citation, the Academy said: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." Orhan Pamuk held his Nobel Lecture 7 December 2006, at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. The lecture was entitled "Babamın Bavulu" (My Father's Suitcase) and was given in Turkish. In the lecture he viewed the relations between Eastern and Western Civilizations in an allegorical upper text which covers his relationship with his father.(source wikipedia)
Snow also translate into Indonesian Language (DiBalik keheningan Salju).Later in my other website I will share the ebook version of his Novel SNOW.

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