The novel explores themes central to his fiction: the intricacies of identity in a country that straddles East and West, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of beauty and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. In 2003 Pamuk received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red (1998/2001), a murder mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices. His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985/1991 in English translation), The Black Book(1990/1994), and The New Life (1994/1997). He is now Turkey’s most widely read author. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but after enrolling in college to study architecture he decided he wanted to write. His family had made a fortune in railroad construction during the early days of the Turkish Republic and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the children of the city’s privileged elite received a secular, Western-style education. Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he continues to live. Interviewed by Ángel Gurría-Quintana Issue 175, Fall/Winter 2005
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