A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk

Last December — three days before he went on trial for ‘publicly denigrating Turkishness’—I interviewed Orhan Pamuk. It was not and could never have been the usual sort of exchange, because we speak often: over the past three years, I have translated three of his books. We have known each other a lot longer than that. I grew up in Istanbul, on the campus of what was then Robert College and is now called Bogazici University; my father still teaches there. Pamuk attended Robert Academy, which in those days was on the same campus; I went to the sister school on the neighbouring hill. So the Istanbul that Pamuk describes in his books is the lost city of our youth.