Orhan Pamuk in Belgrade by video link

Nemanja Jovanović / Nova.rs

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk attended a presentation in Belgrade of his latest book Nights of Plague by video link on Wednesday.

The book has been published in Serbian by the Geopolitika publisher. It is the first translation of the book.

Pamuk said that the story of the end of the Ottoman Empire was his most ambitious project to date, adding that the reactions of people to that situation were similar to how people react to the pandemic today. “Once the pandemic begins, people always react in the same way: denial,” he said.

Nights of Plague is about an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the spring of 1901 which claimed the lives of a million people.

Orhan is being investigated by the Turkish authorities after a lawyer accused him of offending the founder of modern day Turkey Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, allegedly breaking a law introduced to protect the heritage of the man considered to be the father of the Turkish nation. Panik has denied the charges. “Turkey is not a true democracy which allows freedom of speech. Many people are in jail and the economic situation is catastrophic,” he said.
Orhan won the Nobel Prize of literature in 2006.