Asia Pacific Media Network, CA
Oct 13 2006
TURKEY: Literature Nobel for Turkey’s novelist
Nobel winner praised for his literary talent, defense of freedom of
speech
Dawn
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Stockholm — Turkey’s best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faced
trial this year for insulting his country, won the Nobel prize for
literature on Thursday in a decision some critics called politically
charged.
"I am very glad and honoured. I am very pleased," the Turkish writer
told Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet newspaper when asked how he felt
about winning the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.36 million) prize. "I
will try to recover from this shock."
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 what was seen as a test case for freedom of speech in Turkey,
Orhan Pamuk was tried for insulting ‘Turkishness’ after alleging in
an interview with a Swiss paper last year that one 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.
"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.
"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.
Orhan Pamuk, 54, 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 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.
"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.
Artistic Freedom
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn celebrated Pamuk’s award as a
triumph for free speech.
"Today’s Nobel Prize is good news for world literature, but also good
news for artistic freedom and for freedom of expression," he said in
a statement.
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.
Academy head Horace Engdahl stressed on Thursday that politics did
not colour the selection process.