Do we like Orhan Pamuk?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Free-speech fights, criticism of sexist remarks and a graceful take on feminist critique are all good; we found nothing on LGBTQ+ issues either way.
Orhan Pamuk is the Istanbul novelist who became Turkey's first Nobel literature laureate, and he is still big news at home and abroad. This year he got the Netflix treatment: a nine-part Turkish series of his novel The Museum of Innocence, which he says he signed off page by page, and in which he plays himself in a few scenes.
The Netflix saga shows he guards his work fiercely. The New York Times reports he ruled out a second season so the ending would stand, and that he sued a producer over an earlier adaptation deal and won the rights back in 2022. He also told the paper that if the story is changed too much, “the rest of the book is not my book at all.”
His big stoush started in 2005, when a Swiss newspaper interview had him saying Turks had killed Kurds and Armenians. He was charged in Turkey with insulting Turkish identity and faced up to three years in jail. The case collapsed in January 2006 on a technicality after the Justice Ministry said the decision wasn't its to make.
It didn't end there. In 2011 a small claims court in Istanbul's Şişli district ordered him to pay 6,000 liras to five people, including a lawyer and relatives of soldiers killed in action, over the same remarks. It was a civil compensation ruling, not a criminal conviction, and the article doesn't say whether he appealed.
Then came Nights of Plague. In 2021 an Izmir lawyer complained to prosecutors that the novel insulted Atatürk and the flag; the prosecutor first decided not to proceed, but a judge accepted the lawyer's appeal and the probe reopened. Pamuk and his publisher deny it, and the Swedish Academy said it was following the case. We found no final outcome.
On the harm test, the record is clean as far as we could find. In a 2014 interview he criticised the Turkish president's remarks that men and women aren't equal, and said the climate of fear in Turkey was the worst thing. Asked about feminist criticism of his male-centred novel, he said he accepted it, and he praised having a woman direct the series. Honest gap: we found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people, for or against.