Pamuk's My Name Is Red

About My Name Is Red

Orhan Pamuk (born 1952) is the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 and is the most internationally celebrated Turkish writer of the modern era. Born into a prosperous Istanbul family and educated at Robert College (an American high school in Istanbul) and Istanbul Technical University before switching to journalism, he has spent his career writing about Istanbul — its melancholy, its position between East and West, its Ottoman inheritance and its Turkish Republic modernity. My Name Is Red (1998) is his masterpiece: a murder mystery among 1590s Ottoman miniaturist painters that is also a philosophical novel about artistic representation and the tension between Islamic and Western aesthetic traditions. Snow (2002) is his most political novel; The Museum of Innocence (2008) is his most emotionally direct love story. His memoir Istanbul (2003) is essential for understanding the hüzün — collective melancholy — that pervades all his fiction. He was briefly prosecuted in Turkey under Article 301 for 'insulting Turkishness' in a newspaper interview in which he mentioned the Armenian genocide.