Not so long ago, novelist Orhan Pamuk faced imprisonment in his homeland of Turkey. On Thursday, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for novels of rich melancholy that evoke what the Swedish Academy called “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
A best-selling and provocative author in Turkey who has steadily gained an international following, Pamuk is also seen by his supporters as a champion for the cause of free expression.
Speaking from New York, where he is teaching at Columbia University, Pamuk said, “This is first of all an honor bestowed upon the Turkish language, Turkish culture and Turkey itself, as well as on my writings … which I produced solitary in my room.”
Pamuk waved off several questions about the political impact of his award.
“My writing shows that East and West can combine, that is what we have to wish for, to hope for,” he said. “The fact that the image of Turkish culture does not exist in Western literature doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
In novels such as “My Name is Red” and “Snow,” Pamuk, 54, sets modern struggles over personal, cultural and political identity against backdrops of Turkey’s tortured Ottoman past, its wars and the majestic beauty of Istanbul.
While Pamuk’s narrative artistry is widely praised, it is his political activism that has drawn attention recently–and which many Turks suspect was behind the academy’s decision.
In December 2005, Pamuk was tried for allegedly “insulting the Turkishness” of his country. The charges stemmed from an interview with a Swiss newspaper, in which he spoke of massacres in Turkey of Armenians and Kurds–topics traditionally taboo in nationalist Turkey.
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Turkey does not recognize the early 20th Century slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman forces as genocide and has long battled separatist aspirations among its Kurdish minority. Pamuk later noted he was not offering a definitive contradiction of the official version of history but urging matters be discussed.
The case was later dropped on a technicality.
In Pamuk’s home city of Istanbul word of the prize spread quickly. Afternoon newspapers carried front-page articles, and his name was sprinkled in conversations aboard ferryboats plying the Golden Horn and at restaurants where people gathered to break the Ramadan fast.
“Of course we are proud that this prize would go to a Turk,” said Gunel Altintas, a poet. “But it’s a political decision too, and so it is very difficult in many ways for us to accept.”
Some nationalists were furious. “The prize was not given to Pamuk for being a writer, nor to his works,” said Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who heads a conservative group that has advocated prosecution of Pamuk and other authors. “He was given the award for directly insulting the Turkish nation.”
Pamuk is the first writer from a predominantly Muslim country to win the literature prize since Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz in 1988.