Book Series Guide
Orhan Pamuk

Author guide

Orhan Pamuk Books in Order

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and became one of Turkey’s most internationally influential modern writers. His fiction combines historical settings, metafiction, philosophical inquiry, mystery, and close attention to Istanbul’s cultural and political life. Alongside his novels, he has published memoirs, essays, lectures, screenplays, photography books, museum catalogues, and illustrated notebooks. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

literary fictionhistorical fictionpostmodern fictionmemoiressaysliterary criticismscreenplayphotographyvisual art

Catalog record updated .

Orhan Pamuk's Newest Book

Cover of Memories of Distant Mountains

Memories of Distant Mountains

diary-and-art-book · First published 2022

The journals of the Nobel Prize–winning author, beautifully illustrated with his own paintings For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him. A beautiful object in its own right, in Memories of Distant Mountains readers can explore Pamuk's intoxicating inner world and can have a fascinating, intimate encounter with the art, culture, and charged political currents that have shaped one of literature’s most important voices.

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

Cover of My Name Is Red

My Name Is Red

A richly plotted historical novel and an accessible introduction to Pamuk's recurring concerns with art, identity, history, and competing cultural traditions.

Cover of Snow

Snow

A politically charged literary novel that combines romance, mystery, social conflict, and modern Turkish history.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

The clearest entry point into Pamuk's autobiographical perspective and his enduring imaginative relationship with Istanbul.

Outside the series

Bibliography by category

Novels (12)
  1. Cevdet Bey and His Sons

    novel · 1982

  2. Silent House

    novel · 1983

    As the political tension from Turkey’s tumultuous struggle for modernity builds, an old widow Fatma waits with her faithful servant Recep for her grandchildren to descend for their annual visit. Faruk, a failed historian; his sensitive…

  3. The White Castle

    novel · 1985

    From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a dazzling work of historical fiction and a treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. From a Turkish writer who has been…

  4. The Black Book

    novel · 1990

    Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize…

  5. The New Life

    novel · 1994

    'I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.' So begins The New Life, Orhan Pamuk's fabulous road novel about a young student who yearns for the life promised by a dangerously magical book. On his remarkable journey, he falls in…

  6. My Name Is Red

    novel · 1998

    From one of the most important and acclaimed writers at work today, a thrilling new novel—part murder mystery, part love story—set amid the perils of religious repression in sixteenth-century Istanbul. When the Sultan commissions a great…

  7. Snow

    novel · 2002

    After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves.

  8. The Museum of Innocence

    novel · 2008

    "It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it." So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red.It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul.…

  9. The Secrets of the Black Book

    literary-nonfiction · 2013

  10. A Strangeness in My Mind

    novel · 2014

    Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve, he comes to Istanbul-"the center of the world"-and…

  11. The Red-Haired Woman

    novel · 2016

    From the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Snow and My Name Is Red, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them. On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a well digger and his young…

  12. Nights of Plague

    novel · 2021

    It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria-the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire-located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox…

Nonfiction (3)
  1. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

    literary-criticism · 2010

    From the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red—an inspired, thoughtful, and deeply personal book of essays about reading and writing novels. In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he…

  2. Memories of Distant Mountains

    diary-and-art-book · 2022

    The journals of the Nobel Prize–winning author, beautifully illustrated with his own paintings For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with…

Short fiction (1)
  1. Other Colors

    essay-and-story-collection · 1999

    In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie,…

Essays and speeches (3)
  1. My Father's Suitcase

    lecture-collection · 2007

  2. Fragments from the Landscape

    essay-and-interview-collection · 2010

  3. The Innocence of Memories

    scripts-and-essays · 2016

Plays (1)
  1. Secret Face

    screenplay · 1992

Other (3)
  1. The Innocence of Objects

    art-book · 2012

    From the [author's website][1]: > The culmination of decades of omnivorous collecting, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul uses his novel of lost love, The Museum of Innocence, as a departure point to explore the city of his…

  2. Balkon

    photography-book · 2018

  3. Orange

    photography-book · 2020