Turkish Voices

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Pico Iyer reviews OTHER COLORS, the new book by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the essay, Iyer salutes the work of Maureen Freely, Pamuk's English translator and author of the amazing novel Enlightment, which will be published by Overlook in May 2008: "For those who devour Pamuk in English, his particular sound of innocence and sophistication - lyrical, vulnerable, deeply human and engaging - has come to us with special immediacy since Maureen Freely began to translate him a few years ago. In the kind of coincidence Pamuk himself might have devised, Freely, an American novelist based in Britain, was a student at the same American school in Istanbul as Pamuk, and at the same time, though they never knew each other then. Now (with Pamuk at her side during the revisions), she has found a voice for the Turkish writer that seems as close to us as her own."