Watch our conversation with Graham School Instructor Esra Tasdelen on the work of Turkish author and Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk. Together, we explore Pamuk’s most recent novel, Nights of Plague, a work of historical fiction set in the late Ottoman Empire in the midst of an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

Alongside analyzing the historical context and comparing the novel to Pamuk’s earlier works, we draw parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic and the realities of life in the twenty-first century. The conversation previews Tasdelen’s upcoming course at Graham this spring: https://graham.uchicago.edu/programs-courses/course/huas80018-nights-plague-reading-orhan-pamuk-global-pandemic.