The Turkish Nobel prize‑winning novelist Orhan Pamuk never sleeps for more than four hours at a time. He likes to read and maybe write a bit when he wakes. So it was the middle of the night when he learned the news about the attack on Salman Rushdie in the US last month. Like Rushdie, who has needed protection since a fatwa was decreed following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989, Pamuk has had bodyguards for 15 years, after he made comments about the 1915 mass killings of Armenians and Kurds in an interview in 2005. Pamuk and Rushdie became friends when they were both living in New York in the early 2000s.
Earlier that day, I had interviewed Pamuk on Zoom about his new novel, Nights of Plague, set on an imaginary island in the early 20th century, at the end of the Ottoman empire. Does it make him more fearful for himself, I asked in a follow-up call. “I would say cautious is the right word,” he replies carefully. At first, unable to sit in cafes, or stroll about his beloved city of Istanbul alone, he worried that having protection would distance him from the everyday life that is his inspiration. But over the years he has become “quite relaxed about it … I’m used to it.” As he likes to joke: “I used to have three bodyguards, now I have one, which means Turkey is improving.”
