As a Turkish writer teaching in the United States, what do you see as the key differences between the two countries, and their strengths and weaknesses? Running themes in your work are the tension between east and west, and between tradition and modernity. Nights of Plague is a realist description of the decline and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the story of three couples trapped on a typical Ottoman island in the Mediterranean. But it turned out to be a long epic, since I enjoyed writing about period details with precision. And governments always get authoritarian to impose quarantine measures.įive years ago, the Turkish government was becoming increasingly repressive so I thought it was a good time to write my short, allegorical plague novel. Sometimes governments fell, or they ran away, or volunteers took over and replaced the governments. First denial then the numbers go up then all sorts of conspiracy theories. My reading taught me that humanity behaved more or less the same during each pandemic. I read about a third bubonic plague pandemic which began in China circa 1894. Six years ago, I discovered and read about anti-cholera quarantine uprisings in Poland and Russia in the 1890s. After this initial enthusiasm, for a while I thought about writing a plague novel, discussing and arguing against the orientalist notion that Muslims were more fatalistic compared to Christians. At first, I was planning to set it in medieval Ottoman times.

I began to think about a plague novel 40 years ago. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African.Tell me about your new novel, Nights of Plague. And the author of Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters, has chosen Imogen Binnie’s ground-breaking novel, Nevada, as her Book I'd Never Lend.Ī Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoeīlack England: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina Johny also talks to actor Paterson Joseph about the extraordinary life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a freed slave and later prominent Black activist in Georgian Britain, who inspired his debut novel, The Secret Diaries of Ignatius Sancho. Set on an island in the Mediterranean in 1901, the bubonic plague takes hold, as the daughter of a deposed sultan, Princess Pakize, her husband, and a famous doctor Bonkowski Pasha, arrive on a mission to persuade the population to abide by quarantine rules.

An atmospheric and richly detailed portrait of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the psychology of a pandemic. Johny Pitts talks to Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk about his prescient new novel, Nights of Plague.

Orhan pamuk books