NOBEL WINNER PAMUK POSTPONES UNIVERSITY LECTURE
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 14 2006
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was announced as the winner of the
2006 Nobel Prize in literature, has put off a lecture he was scheduled
to give at the University of Minnesota on Monday.
"Orhan Pamuk … must postpone his trip to the University of Minnesota
until later in the year because of all the notoriety surrounding the
announcement of the prize," according to a statement posted on the
official web site of the university, where he was going to give a
lecture on Turkish literature.
The lecture entitled "On Making the Other Talk" was originally
scheduled to be held at the Cowles Auditorium in the Minneapolis
campus of the university.
The Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in CLA,the Institute for
Advanced Study, the Institute for Global Studies and the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies are the co-sponsors of the lecture.
On Oct. 12, Pamuk, arguably Turkey’s most renowned contemporary writer,
was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first
Turk to claim the most prestigious award in the world.
However, some claim that politics was involved in the decision of
the Nobel jury, since Pamuk won the prize on the same day as the
French National Assembly adopted a bill criminalizing the denial of
the so-called Armenian genocide.
In October 2005, Pamuk said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper
that one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed
in Turkey and that nobody had the courage to talk about it except
him. He then faced a trial in Istanbul last December for insulting
Turkishness, but the court eventually dropped the charges.