Ferit Orhan Pamuk (born June 7, 1952) is a Turkish writer and novelist. He was the first Turkish-language novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. Born in Istanbul to a cultured Turkish family, he studied architecture and journalism before turning to literature. He is considered one of Turkey’s most prominent contemporary writers, and his works have been translated into 34 languages ​​and read in over 100 countries. In February 2003, Pamuk told a Swiss magazine, “One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed on this land, but no one but me dares to say it.”

He was prosecuted in Turkish courts for “insulting Turkish identity” and the almost sacred figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, both crimes punishable under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. He was acquitted at the end of 2006. In addition to his statements on the Armenian and Kurdish genocides and massacres, Pamuk was the first writer in the Muslim world to condemn the Iranian fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie for his writings, which some considered offensive to Islam. He received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1990 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

In February 2007, following the murder of a Turkish journalist of Armenian descent for his writings condemning the Armenian genocide, Orhan Pamuk received death threats. Security authorities informed him that these threats were serious, so he withdrew approximately one million dollars and fled to the United States. He was chosen as a member of the jury for the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.