Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnam Duryanurthy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is one of the greatest living

Turkish writers or Han Pamuk won a Nobel Prize for literature 20 years ago but he is prolific,

complex and his latest work, Knights of Plague, has just been translated into English after

coming out in Turkey in 2021. It is set in 1901. It is a timely book because it addresses questions

of pandemic and how governments deal with them but also the birth of nations and the ends of empire.

Or Han Pamuk, thank you very much for joining us. The book came out in Turkey in March of 2021

in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of lockdown and yet this has nothing to do with

coronavirus. It is to do with plague in 1901. It's an extraordinary collision of events that made

that happen, isn't it? I began to think about this book almost 40 years ago. At first I was thinking

about writing a plague novel set in medieval Ottoman times. I thought plague would dramatize

the events and will give me a lot of deaths, a lot of people dying and this will trigger in a way

the individuality of my characters and I'll have a good novel but I was too young to write it

40 years ago. Another 20 years I spent writing a plague novel essentially criticizing

Orientalist Western perceptions of Turks, Ottomans, Muslims, whatever you call them,

being fatalistic because as I was writing my white castle I've read a lot of Western travelers

who lived in a stumble during the time of plague and they all noticed the same thing. These locals,

Turks, Muslims do not care too much about the fact that it's contagious that you should have

listened to the government or pay attention to regulations of quarantine and they will say,

well, if God had decided to kill us what can we do kind of fatalistic reaction?

I was perhaps too much influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism

...