Thinkers Timeline

Herodotus (c.484-425 BCE) was an ancient Greek writer, born in Halicarnassus, a city on the southwestern coast of what is now Turkey. He lived during one of the most dramatic periods in the ancient world: the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. He is called the father of history, a title given to him by the Roman writer Cicero, because he was the first person we know of who systematically investigated the past through inquiry and travel rather than simply recording myths or royal chronicles. The word history itself comes from the Greek word he used in the opening of his work, historie, meaning inquiry or investigation. He travelled extensively across the known world, visiting Egypt, the Persian Empire, Scythia in what is now Ukraine and Russia, and many other places. He talked to people, visited sites of important events, collected stories, and tried to understand why things had happened. His great work, which we call The Histories, tells the story of the wars between Greece and Persia but ranges far beyond this into the customs, geography, and history of dozens of peoples. He died around 425 BCE, probably in the Greek colony of Thurii in southern Italy.

Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, feminist political leader, soldier, and public intellectual. She is widely regarded as the founding mother of the modern Turkish novel and one of Turkey's most important twentieth-century writers. She was born in Istanbul in 1884 to an upper-class Ottoman family. Her father was a secretary to Sultan Abdülhamid II. The family was associated with the Dönmeh, a community of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who maintained some Sabbatean traditions privately. She was educated at home by tutors in Ottoman and European literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano, English, French, and Arabic, and briefly attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She began writing journalism and fiction in her early twenties. She divorced her first husband in 1910 when he took a second wife, an unusual act of defiance against polygamy in late Ottoman society. She married the politician and physician Adnan Adıvar in 1917. During the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) she became one of the movement's most powerful voices: she addressed the famous Sultanahmet rally in 1919 against Greek occupation, then went to Anatolia to join Mustafa Kemal's nationalist forces. She served as a corporal and later as a sergeant-major, working as a press officer and translator. She wrote about the war in The Turkish Ordeal. Her relationship with Mustafa Kemal soured after independence. As his single-party regime tightened, she and her husband went into exile in Britain and France in 1926. She did not return to Turkey for fourteen years. She wrote extensively in English during exile, including her two-volume Memoirs (1926, 1928). She returned to Turkey in 1939, served as the first woman professor at Istanbul University from 1940 to 1950, and was elected to the National Assembly from 1950 to 1954. She died in Istanbul on 9 January 1964.

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish citizen to receive the prize. He is widely regarded as one of the major living novelists in any language. His books have sold over thirteen million copies and have been translated into more than sixty languages. He was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 into a wealthy, Westernised family. His grandfather had made a fortune in railways under the early Republic. His father was an engineer who also had unrealised literary ambitions. Pamuk grew up in the upmarket Nişantaşı neighbourhood of Istanbul, surrounded by books and the lingering melancholy of a fallen Ottoman world. He planned to be a painter through his teens. Family pressure pushed him toward a more practical career, and he enrolled in architecture at Istanbul Technical University. After three years he dropped out and shifted to journalism at the University of Istanbul, graduating in 1977. He had decided he wanted to write novels. He spent the next eight years writing in his parents' apartment, supported by his family. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons), was published in 1982 and won several Turkish literary prizes. His international breakthrough came with The Black Book (1990) and especially My Name Is Red (1998), set among Ottoman miniaturist painters in 1591. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006. In 2005 he was prosecuted under Turkey's Article 301 for telling a Swiss newspaper that 'thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it'. The charges were eventually dropped on a technicality, but death threats forced him to live with security and to spend significant time abroad. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 2007 while continuing to live primarily in Istanbul.