The novel has gained popularity in Turkey due to its resemblance to the novel My Name is Red by the Nobel Prize winner Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.
However in 2011 the festival hit a set back when a number respected writers inclduding Kiran Dessai and Novel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk boycotted the event to protest against the Sri Lankan Government's alleged involvement in attacks on journalists and writers.
In recent years, a well-attended author event series has hosted Al Gore, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, John Updike, Orhan Pamuk, and Stephen King, in addition to a number of local writers and academics.
In December 2005, he visited Turkey to attend the trial against Orhan Pamuk and speak at an event for the Greens of Turkey.
The team and its fans are referenced several times in the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
Orhan Pamuk's novel, My Name is Red (1998), has a plot line between two characters, Shekure and Black, which echoes the Khosrow and Shirin story, which is also retold in the book.
Married to New York Times correspondent Nina Bernstein, Huyssen is also a longtime friend of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and often hosts him when the writer comes to the US.
He has translated works of renowned authors such as Jack London, Yaşar Kemal, Aziz Nesin and Orhan Pamuk into Kurdish.
In this magazine has been published interviews with many writers, poetss, film directors, composers and singers such as Victor Erofeyev, Ahmad Shamlou, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, Mahmoud Dolatabadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Kamran Shirdel, Bahman Farmanara, Shahrdad Rohani, Alireza Assar and Mohammad-Reza Lotfi.
Important contemporary writers expressed admiration of the author’s literary work and his moral stand before and after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Munoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others.
Since the publication of Tutunamayanlar many Turkish novelists have broken away from traditional styles, first the slightly older writer Adalet Ağaoğlu, then others including Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin.
Seven Nobel prize winners have also had events at the store: Seamus Heaney, Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, and John M. Coetzee.
In recent decades, the TLS has included essays, reviews and poems by John Ashbery, Italo Calvino, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Orhan Pamuk, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney, among others.
The Tokatlıyan Hotel is mentioned in many literary works such as Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book and Agatha Christie's Parker Pyne Investigates and Murder on the Orient Express.