WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 9 Features “From then on, Kai Hang only bought blouses and skirts in different shades of gray, over a spectrum covering twenty degrees of light and dark between white and black, aware that even gray could come in many variations and intensities. Although the streets were full of people dressed in gray, none was as thorough or flawless as Kai Hang.” Turn to page 14 to read Dung Kai-cheung’s “Gray,”a story from his ninety-nine sketches of contemporary popular culture in Hong Kong. PHOTO BY SEE-MING LEE 10 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 photo : simon hurst / shevaun williams and associates rhan Pamuk (b. 1952, Istanbul), laureate of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, started out his writing career as a poet (see WLT, November 2006). After studying architecture at Istanbul Technical University, he was thirty years old when his first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (1982; Mr. Cevdet and his sons), was published. Pamuk achieved worldwide prominence with the publication of Kara Kitap (Eng. The Black Book, 1994) in 1990, which stirred controversy in Turkish literary circles. Since then, his work, while being compared to such legendary Turkish authors as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Selim İleri, has achieved global renown in its own right. His latest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, is due out from Knopf in October. Mr. Pamuk graciously agreed to the following interview, which was conducted at his home office in Istanbul’s Cihangir neighborhood. Erkut Tokman: First of all, let me wish you a warm welcome. Since your first novels were published there has been a steady growth in interest in your works, and you Q&A Be Humble, Notice Everything, and Be Fair” A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk by Erkut Tokman O “ WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 now reach a much wider public. Your readership increased even further after you received the Nobel Prize, and today I believe you have over thirteen million readers in sixty-three languages. Although there are shared elements among all your novels, each has a different structure and is popular with different sections of your readership. What do you think is the reason for this? Orhan Pamuk: I remember looking at the figures when I won the Nobel Prize, and I had been translated into forty-six languages; as you mentioned, this has now reached sixty-three. It’s true that the sales figures have grown, but there is one thing about me that is different from other authors: my most popular book is different in every country. For certain authors it’s not like this. Take Nabokov, for example; wherever you go, Lolita is his most widely read book. In Turkey, the first book anyone reads by Yaşar Kemal is Memed, My Hawk. The sales of or interest in those books overshadow all the others. There are bad examples of this too. In Turkey this is the case with Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s The Wren, for example: The Wren is a lightweight, melodramatic love story about an idealistic teacher. Reşat Nuri Güntekin has written books of great depth that are much richer and more elaborate, that see all the different shades of life, and that deal with the evil side of human nature, but the easyto -read and melodramatic aspect of that novel takes center stage and overshadows his other works. Luckily, I don’t have any one book that takes center stage! My most popular book varies, both in my own country and throughout the world. In Turkey the figures are very close: until recently my bestselling books were My Name Is Red and Snow; but now A Strangeness in My Mind, which was published four months ago, has quickly broken their sales records. In Spain, for example, the most popular of my books is Istanbul. The Black Book is very popular in France and is constantly being reprinted but wasn’t so popular in English-speaking countries. The biggest sales for My Name Is Red were in China, where it sold almost half a million; it is also my most popular book in Britain. If I’m not mistaken, my best-selling book in America is...