Raised in a wealthy and Western-oriented family, Pamuk attended Robert College, an American school in Istanbul, and went on to study architecture at Istanbul Technical University. After three years he dropped out and devoted himself full-time to writing. In 1977 he graduated from the University of Istanbul with a degree in journalism. From 1985 to 1988 he lived in the United States and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York and the University of Iowa.

Pamuk began writing seriously in 1974 and eight years later published his first novel, Cevdet Bey ve oğulları (“Cevdet Bey and His Sons”), a sweeping history of an Istanbul family during and after the establishment of the Turkish republic. He first achieved international fame with Beyaz kale (1985; The White Castle), his third novel, which explores the nature of identity through the story of a learned young Italian captured and made a slave to a scholar in 17th-century Istanbul. His later novels, which were widely translated, include Kara kitap (1990; The Black Book), a dense depiction of Istanbul, and the mysteries Yeni hayat (1996; The New Life) and Benim adım kırmızı (1998; My Name Is Red). In Kar (2002; Snow) a Turkish poet living in exile in Germany faces the tensions between East and West when he travels to a poor town in a remote area of Turkey. İstanbul: hatıralar ve șehir (2004; Istanbul: Memories and the City, also published as Istanbul: Memories of a City) is a partly fictionalized memoir. Masumiyet müzesi (2008; “The Museum of Innocence”) investigates the relationship between an older man and his second cousin. Thwarted in his attempts to marry her, the man begins to collect objects that she has touched. Pamuk replicated the titular museum in reality, using a house in Istanbul to display a range of items amassed while plotting the story.

Many of these works, often autobiographical and intricately plotted, show an understanding of traditional Turkish Islamic culture tempered by a belief that Turkey's future lies in the West. Pamuk drew criticism from some in Turkey for advocating the country's integration into Europe and its accession to the European Union. In 2005, after a Swiss newspaper published an interview in which he repeated claims that Turks had deliberately killed a million Armenians in 1915 (see Armenian massacres) and 30,000 Kurds more recently, Pamuk was charged with “denigrating Turkishness” and put on trial in Turkey in December. The charges, which produced international controversy, were later dropped.