An Interview with Orhan Pamuk

Abstract

In this interview, conducted at Columbia University in the fall of 2013, Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk discusses the trajectory of his own novels, what has and has not changed in the genre's social aspirations and challenges, its characteristic topics and settings, its distinct forms of competition with journalism, on the one hand, and television, on the other. He comments on his relation as a writer to Western postmodernism and the concept of national allegory, on the meaning of innocence, the phenomenology of love, and the novelist's responsibility to both national and international readerships.