SWEDEN: Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best-known novelist and incendiary social commentator, won the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature on Thursday (October 12). In its citation for the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.36 million) prize, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdal said "The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006 is awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his city has discovered new symbols for the interlacing and clashing of cultures." Pamuk, who just months ago went on trial for insulting "Turkishness", was the first author in the Muslim world to condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, "Usually when the announcement comes, it gives rise to all kinds of speculation. that there are hidden intentions of a political nature or other nature that we have wanted to communicate something by giving the prize this year. That's not the case," Horace Engdal said. The Academy said his international breakthrough came with his third book, "Beyaz Kale" or "The White Castle", a historical novel about the relationship of a Venetian slave with the young scholar who buys him, and their gradual blurring of identities. "Orhan is a man who has renewed the art of the novel, that is what he has done by having recourse to two cultures that are related, but profoundly different which he masters with equal excellence. And he has made them combine with his natural prose in a way that no one else has," Engdal said. The Swedish Academy said Pamuk in his writing often plays with the notion of self and of doubles, themes that appeared again in a later work, "Kara Kitap" or "The Black Book", in which the main character searches Istanbul for his wife and her half-brother, with whom he later exchanges identities. Pamuk, whose best-selling novels include "My Name is Red" and "Snow", focuses in his work on the clash between past and present, East and West, secularism and Islamism -- problems at the heart of Turkey's struggle to develop. In January, a Turkish court dropped criminal charges against Pamuk who was charged under article 301 of a new penal code, which forbids insulting Turkish identity. Pamuk upset nationalists by telling a Swiss newspaper last year nobody in Turkey dared mention the killing of a million Armenians during World War One or 30,000 Kurds in recent decades.

ITN Source | October 12, 2006

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