Orhan Pamuk’s novels are steeped in memory, melancholy, and obsession. He writes about Turkey—its ghosts, contradictions, and secret lives—with the intensity of someone trying to preserve a disappearing dream. His books are panoramic, philosophical, and personal. He works by hand. He revises obsessively. He builds his stories like an engineer, but writes them like a poet.
Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and has spent most of his life there. Raised in a wealthy, Westernized family, he trained as an architect before giving it up to become a novelist. “I am a failed artist,” he told Alain Elkann. “All my life until the age of twenty-two, I wanted to be a painter. Then something happened—I stopped painting and began writing novels.”
His first book, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982. He followed it with The Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, and The New Life—novels that mixed East and West, myth and modernity, realism and hallucination. But it was My Name Is Red and Snow that made him an international star, both deeply rooted in Turkey’s culture and utterly original in structure and voice.
In 2006, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Nights of Plague, his most recent novel, Pamuk returns to the themes that have haunted his work for decades—epidemics, power, paranoia, and death—but sets them in a fictional Ottoman island during the collapse of empire. Like much of his writing, the book feels eerily prescient, even though it was conceived years before COVID-19.
“I don’t write to explain my country to others,” he told Slate. “I write for deeper reasons. I’m writing stories. In the end, when they are successful, they explain something, but that’s not the motivation.”
Pamuk’s critics in Turkey have accused him of being too Western, too political, too popular. His defense is simple: he writes slowly, seriously, and for himself. “I do not regret any of my books,” he said at the Sharjah International Book Fair. “They are all results of long and obsessive work.”
Orhan Pamuk’s daily writing routine
Pamuk writes his novels by hand, in long, solitary stretches, often up to ten hours a day. He begins early, avoids distractions, and rarely uses a computer. “I’m a handwriter, perhaps one of the last,” he told Alain Elkann. “I have kept every single sheet of paper that I wrote on for the last forty-five years.”
Each day starts the same way: he wakes up at seven and begins writing immediately. In the mornings, he doesn’t check email or answer calls. “I am such an obsessive person that even if I don’t have good concentration, I insist and continue,” he said. “This book I averaged ten hours a day.”
For years, he kept his writing space separate from his home life. “The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination,” he told The Paris Review. “So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in… It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.”
Writing, for Pamuk, is less a job than a calling. He often compares it to play. “I don’t see writing fiction as work because I feel like a boy who is playing with his toys all the time,” he told Slate. “It’s work, essentially, but it’s fun and games also.”
He writes slowly, revises endlessly, and treats each draft as a form of craftsmanship. “You write in a poetic mood,” he told an audience at the Sharjah International Book Fair. “The next morning, you edit like an engineer.”
Even in the digital age, the author avoids screens. “I don’t want to look at a computer all day,” he said. “Reading news or sending emails is enough. Some of my writing friends used electric typewriters, but I couldn’t move to the computer, looking at the screens made me cry.”
Instead, he fills notebooks, revises by hand, and works with a team to transcribe his drafts. “There are magical people gifted with mystical powers who can read my handwriting,” he joked. “They transcribe it and send it back to me. After that I hand correct, and make additions, like Marcel Proust.”
When he’s not in Istanbul, he works from his summer house on an island in the Sea of Marmara. He swims in the morning, writes through the day, and returns to the water in the evening. “Don’t worry about me,” he told Slate. “I’m writing my books.”
Pamuk has said he fears losing his memory more than losing his fame. “To be able to write,” he explained, “you should be able to hold six subjects in your mind simultaneously and combine them in artistic acrobatics. Now, if someone calls or says hello, all six disappear!”
But for now, he’s still writing. Still waking up early. Still revising by hand. Still obsessed. “Thank God the point is not being famous, because I already have fame,” he said. “The point is that I can enjoy the imaginary, whether it’s artistic or literary.”
No Comments