Turkey gets Literature Nobel

Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamukwon the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday.

Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faced trial this year for “insulting Turkishness”, won the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday — a decision some critics said was more political than literary.

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Pamuk, 54, shot to fame with The White Castle and My Name is Red, novels that explore Turkey’s complex identity through its imperial past.

In a telephone interview with news agency Associated Press, Pamuk, a visiting professor at Columbia University, US, said he was overjoyed by the award, adding that the remarks he made earlier this year referring to the Nobel prize as “nonsense” were a “mistranslation”. He said he accepted the prize not just as "a personal honour, but as an honour bestowed upon the Turkish literature and culture I represent”.

Recently, Pamuk's criticism of modern Turkey had turned him into a symbol of free thought. In a case seen as a test of freedom of speech in Turkey, he was tried for insulting Turkishness after he told a Swiss newspaper last year that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War I and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades. Earlier this year, the charges were dismissed on a technicality. But the high-profile trial was an embarrassment to the Turkish government.

Pamuk’s best-selling works include the political novel Snow. His recent work, Istanbul: Memories of a City, intersperses personal reminiscences with reflections on the city’s past. In a flat in that city, overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus linking Europe and Asia, he writes, chain-smokes and says, “Istanbul's fate is my fate.”