Orhan Pamuk, a Special Event

Presented by Inprint and Brazos Bookstore

All TICKETS: $30 general admission, includes pre-signed copy of Pamuk's latest book, The Museum of  Innocence (presented to attendees at the door on the evening of the reading). TICKETS WILL BE ON SALE AT THE DOOR, STARTING AT 6:30 PM.

Following the reading, Pamuk will be interviewed on-stage by Houston author and UH Creative Writing Program faculty member Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Submit questions for Pamuk here.

The great cities have their great chroniclers: Paris has Balzac, Dublin has Joyce—and Istanbul has Orhan Pamuk.  In 2006, announcing his Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy celebrated Pamuk’s “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city.”  In epic novels such as The Black Book and My Name is Red, Pamuk “has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” A Pamuk book can blend together history and politics, love and murder, art and intrigue. 

Like his beloved Istanbul, Pamuk is a writer who stands at a crossroads—between East and West, modernity and tradition, the individual and the nation state.  Born in 1952 into a family of engineers, Pamuk was destined to become an engineer of the imagination.  As an adolescent he was interested in painting and architecture, but became a full-time writer in his early twenties.  A published novelist since the 1970s, Pamuk did not receive real international recognition until the 1990s.  In the last fifteen years, however, readers around the world have come to savor the way that Pamuk writes about Istanbul and its people, using one to inform the other, so that, as he has put it himself, “it’s impossible to distinguish the character from the city, the city from the character.” 

Orhan Pamuk lived in the United States for three years in the 1980s, when he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University and the University of Iowa.  Currently he is Robert Yik-Fong Professor in the Humanities at Columbia.  On November 16, he reads from his new book, The Museum of Innocence, in Houston, another city that knows about the “interlacing of cultures.”