[4] Pamuk's novels include Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red and Snow.

My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.

[6] Pamuk's willingness to write books about contentious historical and political events put him at risk of censure in his homeland.

The court initially declined to hear the case, but in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to pay 6,000 liras in compensation for having insulted the plaintiffs' honor.

His historical novel Beyaz Kale (The White Castle), published in Turkish in 1985, won the 1990 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction and extended his reputation abroad.

In 1992, he wrote the screenplay for the movie Gizli Yüz (Secret Face), based on Kara Kitap and directed by a prominent Turkish director, Ömer Kavur.

Pamuk's fifth novel, Yeni Hayat (New Life), caused a sensation in Turkey upon its 1994 publication and became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history.

Curated by Gerhard Steidl, the German publisher of his photo book Balkon, the exhibition ran for three months at the Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts building on Istanbul's Istiklal Street.

It opens a window into the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III in nine snowy winter days of 1591, inviting the reader to experience the tension between East and West from a breathlessly urgent perspective.

Snow follows Ka, an expatriate Turkish poet, as he wanders around the snowy Kars and gets caught up in the muddle of aimless Islamists, MPs, headscarf advocates, secularists, and a number of factions who die and kill in the name of highly contradictory ideals.

Pamuk stated that "(Museum of Dreams will) tell a different version of the love story set in Istanbul through objects and Grant Gee’s wonderful new film".

[20] In both Snow and the Museum of Innocence Pamuk describes tragic love-stories, where men fall in love with beautiful women at first sight.

Pamuk's heroes tend to be educated men who fall tragically in love with beauties, but who seem doomed to a decrepit loneliness.

[23] Pamuk's books are characterized by a confusion or loss of identity brought on in part by the conflict between Western and Eastern values.

"[25] "I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

One of the writers, nationalist popular historian Murat Bardakçı, accused him of counterfeiting and plagiarism in the Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper.

[29] However, many attributed such accusations to their ignorance about postmodern literature, and the literary technique of intertextuality which Pamuk almost always uses in his novels in full disclosure.

In the 2007–08 academic year Pamuk returned to Columbia to jointly teach comparative literature classes with Andreas Huyssen and David Damrosch.

[37] In 2005, after Pamuk made a statement about the Armenian genocide and mass killings of Kurds, a criminal case was opened against him based on a complaint filed by lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz.

In an interview with BBC News, he said that he wanted to defend freedom of speech, which was Turkey's only hope for coming to terms with its history: "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo.

In October, after the prosecution had begun, Pamuk reiterated his views in a speech given during an award ceremony in Germany: "I repeat, I said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey.

In an interview published in the Akşam newspaper the same day, then Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek said he had not yet received Pamuk's file but would study it thoroughly once it came.

[45] The charges against Pamuk caused an international outcry and led to questions in some circles about Turkey's proposed entry into the European Union.

On 30 November, the European Parliament announced that it would send a delegation of five MEPs led by Camiel Eurlings, to observe the trial.

[47] PEN American Center also denounced the charges against Pamuk, stating: "PEN finds it extraordinary that a state that has ratified both the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which see freedom of expression as central, should have a Penal Code that includes a clause that is so clearly contrary to these very same principles.

"[48] On 13 December, eight world-renowned authors—José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, John Updike and Mario Vargas Llosa—issued a joint statement supporting Pamuk and decrying the charges against him as a violation of human rights.

[50] On 22 January 2006, Turkey's Justice Ministry refused to issue an approval of the prosecution, saying that they had no authority to open a case against Pamuk under the new penal code.

An Ankara-based EU diplomat reportedly said, "It is good the case has apparently been dropped, but the justice ministry never took a clear position or gave any sign of trying to defend Pamuk".

[55] In April 2006, on the BBC's HARDtalk program, Pamuk stated that his remarks regarding the Armenian genocide were meant to draw attention to freedom of expression issues in Turkey rather than to the massacres themselves.

[61] In 2005, Pamuk received the €25,000 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his literary work, in which "Europe and Islamic Turkey find a place for one another."