Orhan Pamuk is one of Turkey's most prominent novelists. Titles (in English) include "The White Castle," "The Black Book," "The New Life," "My Name is Red," "Snow," "Isbanbul: Memories of a City," "Other Colors: Essays and a Story" and his newest book, "The Museum of Innocence." His work has been trnaslated into more than 40 languages and he has received numerous prestigious international prizes, including Le Prix Mediterranee etranger, the Prix Medicis, the Ricarda Huch Prize, and honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Snow, which he describes as “my first and last political novel” was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of “political novel”, telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists.
