Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel Prize laureate in literature, faces judicial investigation once again after an Istanbul court decided to follow up on charges that Pamuk’s most recent novel, “Nights of Plague,” insults Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk.
The charges are being brought by Tarcan Uluk, a lawyer from the Aegean port city of Izmir, who says that Kolagasi Kamil, one of the main characters in the historical fiction, is a thinly veiled avatar of Turkey’s founder. “Nights of Plague” is set in Minger, an imaginary, multiethnic and multifaith Ottoman island on the Aegean Sea in 1901, as a pandemic hits the island and quarantine measures are imposed.
