Ferit Orhan Pamuk, generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk, is a Turkish novelist. He is also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over eleven million books in sixty languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006, the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Turkish citizen. The European Writers' Parliament came from a proposal by Pamuk and José Saramago