In Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow — published in Turkish in 2002 and which led to his winning of the Nobel Prize in 2006 — the omniscient narrator Orhan tells the story of the poet Ka going to the Turkish city Kars at a time of political strife during the early 1990s. Though he is there on an assignment to cover the story of young girls prohibited from wearing their headscarves in public and who are committing suicide in protest, he feels his visit to be more motivated by an attempt to rekindle his love for Ipek, whom he has not seen for several years. He arrives in Kars at the same time that a blizzard closes the town off from the rest of the world, creating a setting ripe for the tension between secular groups and religious …

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Citation: Colleen, Clemens. "Snow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 January 2014 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23240, accessed 23 November 2024.]