Erdağ Göknar

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Erdağ Göknar is a Turkish-American scholar, translator, and poet. He is an Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and directs the Duke University Middle East Studies Center. He is best known for translating Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red into English, a translation that helped Pamuk gain global recognition and contributed to his Nobel Prize in 2006. John Updike praised the translation for its smooth English in The New Yorker. My Name is Red won the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award, a prize shared by author and translator. Göknar’s translation of Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes from Dari was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award in 2004. In 2008 he translated Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Istanbul novel A Mind at Peace, a project that received a National Endowment for the Arts translation grant and was presented to President Barack Obama in 2009. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2013 he published Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel. His poetry collection Nomadologies appeared in 2017, exploring the Turkish-American diaspora. He has received two Fulbright Fellowships.