Erdag Göknar is best known for his award-winning translation of Orhan Pamuk's historical novel MY NAME IS RED, which marked Pamuk's emergence as an author of world literature and opened the way to his selection as Nobel laureate in 2006. The best selling novel was reissued in 2010 as part of the Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics series. Göknar is also the translator of A.H. Tanpinar's iconic novel of Istanbul, A MIND AT PEACE, and Atiq Rahimi's anti-war novella set in Afghanistan, EARTH AND ASHES. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish cultural studies. His translations have earned him the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and two NEA Translation fellowship grants. His critical literary study, ORHAN PAMUK, SECULARISM, AND BLASPHEMY: THE POLITICS OF THE TURKISH NOVEL (Routledge 2013), argues that conflicting tropes of Turkish Islam and state secularism give Pamuk's work currency as world literature. Göknar's poetry collection, NOMADOLOGIES (Turtle Point, 2017), establishes a first poetics of Turkish-American diaspora.

"Göknar writes against silence and the esoteric, offering narratives and lyrics that are dense with multicultural referents and language, yet readily accessible and full of human feeling."—The Georgia Review