Hey!
Remember I told you all how good Snow was? :-) Well, somebody out there was listening...
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Orhan Pamuk wins 2006 Nobel prize for literature By Sarah Edmonds and Niklas Pollard
1 hour, 44 minutes ago
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - 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 in a decision some critics said was more political than literary.
The Swedish Academy declared Pamuk winner of the prize 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 case seen as a test of freedom of speech in Turkey, Pamuk, 54, 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 could face a jail sentence of up to three years.
"With all due respect to Orhan Pamuk, whose books I read and like, I believe his comments on the Armenian genocide have been influential in his winning this prize," said Suat Kiniklioglu, an Ankara-based political analyst.
"I think many Turks will see it in this way too and will not be cheering ... There is a political dimension to all this. I do not believe he was chosen purely on the basis of his artistic capacity," Kiniklioglu said.
Pamuk shot to fame with novels that explore Turkey's complex identity through its rich imperial past.
But his criticism of modern Turkey's failure to confront darker episodes of that past has also turned Pamuk more recently into a symbol of free thought both for the literary world and for the European Union, which Ankara wants to join.
"It is also known, both in Turkey and abroad, that this prize is much more related to politics than to literature," said leading Turkish novelist Pinar Kur.
"NOT AN INSULT"
"What I said is not an insult, it is the truth. But what if it is wrong? Right or wrong, do people not have the right to express their ideas peacefully," Pamuk asked during the trial.
His work has been translated into many languages and has earned him a growing fan club in Europe, America and beyond.
"In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, (Pamuk) has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures," the Swedish Academy said in its citation for the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.36 million) prize.
Swedish Academy head Horace Engdahl said he had only spoken briefly to Pamuk on Thursday.
"He was, of course, very honored and grateful and very happy. He was pleased with the reasoning behind getting the prize at least," Engdahl told reporters after the announcement at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.
"I believe that this will be met with delight by all readers and all lovers of novels. But it can naturally give rise to a certain amount of political turbulence. That is not what we are interested in," he said.
Pamuk's writing often plays with the notion of identity and of doubles, the Academy said.
The Turkish writer's best-selling 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.
His 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.
"Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am," he says.
(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Gareth Jones in Ankara) |
