Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk pens plague story in new novel

Nobel prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has published his latest book, "Veba Geceleri" (Nights of Plague), in a timely arrival when the world can resonate with a plague outbreak on a fictional Ottoman island as it scrambles to end the unprecedented plague of the 21st century: The COVID-19 pandemic.

"I had been pondering about this novel for 40 years and have been writing it over the last four years," Pamuk told daily Hürriyet in an interview.

When asked how he felt about the coincidental time of the coronavirus pandemic overlapping with the publishing of his book, Pamuk said he was "astonished."

"The story of the novel was a world in which I thought people would not be interested. But all of a sudden, after the COVID-19 pandemic, people started living these first-hand, one that I was thinking in the novel. It was like, something you do secretly had shown up."

The book, "Nights of Plague," tells the stories of an Ottoman governor, a doctor and an army major, fighting a plague epidemic on a fictional Ottoman island called Minger.

"When the pandemic began [in 2020], I was in the U.S. for lectures. I flew back to Turkey. When I learnt the first coronavirus stories in Istanbul, I thought that those stories were like my stories in the novel," he noted.

He, then, penned an article for the New York Times, where he said he had been writing a book about a pandemic for the last four years.

"After they published the article, publishing houses in more than 50 countries called and pressed me to finish the book as soon as possible," he added.

When asked about the similarities and differences of the novel with the world today, he said, "My novel is scarier than today's world."

"In the world of 1901, only 5...