There's a question of how much any individual human being can or cannot contribute to the movement or the arc of history. My novel tackles that and that's why I choose an island in fact an imaginary island, because in situations of isolation, drama is intense. When there is an intense historical drama in a small place, human figure has more power in the making of history.
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Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk sits down with Merve Emre, distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University and literary critic for The New Yorker. Together they discuss his latest novel, Nights of Plague, as well as other feats of historical fiction, including works by Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how they help us, the reader, empathise with great unknowns.
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