Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or –hüzün– that all Istanbullus share: A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer.

Pamuk presents the City of Istanbul as seen through Western European photographs, paintings, and travel writings from the nineteenth century, and from Istanbul artists and writers, including journalists, a century later, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as well as from his own experience of walking all over its different neighborhoods.

But Orhan Pamuk is the author of the unique book Istanbul: Memories of a City that reveals the unknown Istanbul. Istanbul that synthesizes his memories from his early childhood and his impressions got from various sources—family conversations, public transportation, football matches, street inscriptions, books written both by Turkish and European writers.

Feb 01, 2014 · Mr. Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and has lived in the city for most of his life. Credit... Mr. Pamuk was born about three and a …