Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk trained first as an architect and briefly as a journalist before abandoning both to write fiction full time in his early twenties, living for years off his family's declining fortune while producing the historical and modernist novels that slowly built his reputation at home and then abroad. He set nearly all his fiction in Istanbul, the city his family had lived in for generations.

My Name Is Red (1998), a murder mystery narrated in rotating voices (including a corpse and a coin) set among sixteenth-century Ottoman miniaturists debating whether Western-style perspective is heresy, carried him to international prominence and, in 2006, the Nobel Prize, the first awarded to a Turkish writer. Snow (2002) took on headscarf politics and Islamist violence in a snowbound border town with similar directness.

In 2005 he faced criminal prosecution in Turkey for 'insulting Turkishness' after publicly discussing the Armenian genocide and Kurdish deaths, a charge eventually dropped under international pressure. He has continued writing and teaching, dividing time between Istanbul and New York.