Orhan Pamuk
Gave up painting at twenty-two, wrote unpublished for seven years and was later put on trial for what he said
Orhan Pamuk grew up in a large apartment block in the Nişantaşı district of Istanbul that his grandfather, a railway engineer, had built for the whole family, and watched the family fortune shrink floor by floor as his father and uncles spent it. From the age of seven he wanted to be a painter. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University as a compromise and left after three years. At 22, for reasons he has said he still does not fully understand, he stopped painting and decided to write novels.
He then spent seven years in a room in his mother\'s flat writing a long family saga that no publisher would take, until it won a prize for unpublished manuscripts and came out in 1982. Slowly, book by book, he built a readership: The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name Is Red, a murder mystery among Ottoman miniaturists that made him famous abroad, and Snow, a political novel set in a bleak eastern town.
In 2005, after he told a Swiss newspaper that a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey and that no one dared talk about it, he was charged with insulting Turkishness. The charges were dropped in early 2006 under pressure from Europe; that October he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He still lives and writes in Istanbul, and in 2012 opened a real museum to accompany his novel The Museum of Innocence.