The Turkish Nobel laureate’s illustrated notebooks offer a vivid insight into his creative process

At the age of 22, Orhan Pamuk dropped out of architecture school to become a writer. His mother used to open his door in the middle of the night to check on him, and would find him smoking and working. “Are you writing?” she would ask. “At least don’t smoke that much.”

This anecdote, which appeared in Other Colours, an earlier collection of essays, shows him as an aspiring young man whose position as one of the most distinguished authors of our age was yet to be secured.