📝 Orhan Pamuk’s Writing Routine

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

Orhan Pamuk’s novels are steeped in memory, melancholy, and obsession. He writes about Turkey—its ghosts, contradictions, and secret lives—with the intensity of someone trying to preserve a disappearing dream. His books are panoramic, philosophical, and personal. He works by hand. He revises obsessively. He builds his stories like an engineer, but writes them like a poet.

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and has spent most of his life there. Raised in a wealthy, Westernized family, he trained as an architect before giving it up to become a novelist. “I am a failed artist,” he told Alain Elkann. “All my life until the age of twenty-two, I wanted to be a painter. Then something happened—I stopped painting and began writing novels.”

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