USA: Turkey's best known novelist Orhan Pamuk wins the Nobel prize for Literature

Story: Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faced trial this year for insulting his country, won the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature on Thursday (October 12) in a decision some critics called politically charged. "Its overwhelming its a sort of a shock but I am very pleased and delighted and I feel a responsibility and I am enjoying the honor and distinction. I am very happy and pleased," he said when asked how he felt about winning the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.36 million) prize. Pamuk, who arrived in the United States to teach, only five days ago was woken up by the call from the Swedish Academy. "I was sleeping. There was a call. I came to New York only five days ago to teach at Columbia till December and I just recently bought myself a mobile phone. So what is this? I don't know how to use my phone. What time is it? And it was middle of the night for me because there was no light," said Pamuk. "Then I answered and then they said I received the Nobel Prize and the secretary of the Swedish Academy would call me soon before he announces the prize and then right after that the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl had called and said that I have received the price and I said I accept this, this is a great honor and I take this price as a celebration of my humble service to the great art of the novel for the last 32 years and also a distinction bestowed upon not only me but also Turkish literature, Turkish culture and the Turkish language through which I am producing my books," he said. Pamuk the first non-American to have won so far in this year's Nobels after Americans scooped prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. Pamuk's best-known novels include "My Name is Red" and "Snow", works that focus on the clash between past and present, East and West, secularism and Islamism -- problems at the heart of Turkey's struggle to develop. Although some say that his politics could have influenced the Nobel committee, critics say that Pamuk's writing is worthy of admiration and of the distinction he has received. His work has been translated into many languages and attracted international fans. "I don't know why my books are now translated to 46 languages, I don't know. I am just listening to an inner music, the mystery of which I don't completely know and I don't want to know. I am writing these novels with devotion and I am very grateful to all the readers but then if you ask why they are reading, I don't know," he said responding to what he thought was the appeal of his work. Pamuk, 54, shot to fame with novels that explore Turkey's complex identity through its rich imperial past. Pamuk's most recent work, "Istanbul: Memories of a City," intersperses personal reminiscences of childhood and youth with reflections on the city's Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman past. "I consider myself as the story king of Istanbul. My books are about my town, Istanbul which was in the last, especially in the last century, was a neglected provincial, pushed into a sort of provincial place. But now it's approaching Europe and it's getting rich and complicated. Our complicated history, the stories and mysteries of Istanbul are my subject. But of course also, I am a writer, a literal writer, so to speak, who dares, takes risks, experiments. I have combined, I think, or I wanted to combine all the great methods, conventions, waves of seeing and narrating of art of the novel and the complicated history of my town, my country, my culture, my language," he said. But his criticism of modern Turkey's failure to confront darker episodes of that past has turned him more recently into a symbol of free thought both for the literary world and for the European Union, which Ankara wants to join. The Swedish Academy declared Pamuk the winner on a day when, to Turkey's fury, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. In a what was seen as a test case for freedom of speech in Turkey, Pamuk was tried for insulting "Turkishness" after telling a Swiss paper last year that 1 million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War One and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades. Though the court dismissed the charges on a technicality, other writers and journalists are still being prosecuted under the article and can face a jail sentence of up to three years. Pamuk refused to comment on the past controversy saying his focus today was on the Nobel. "Look, this is a day for celebration. I don't want to go to politics today. This is a day that I want to be away from politics. Thank you very much," he said. Pamuk later spoke to the press at Columbia where he was a visiting scholar in the 1980's. He was accompanied by the provost of the university and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Pamuk will be teaching at Columbia till December. He spoke to reporters about what it felt as a Turk to win this prize.

ITN Source | October 13, 2006

Tags:. .parliament. .failure. .bought. .swiss. .narrating