PAMUK: THE THORN IN TURKEY’S SIDE

Hindustan Times, India
Oct 17 2006

Press Trust of India
Stockholm

Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature,
is Turkey’s best-known author, but also a straight-talking rebel
whose views on his country’s history have caused a storm both at home
and abroad.

Recent statements on both the situation of Turkey’s Kurds and the
killings of Armenians in the early years of the 20th century turned
Pamuk into a controversial figure.

"One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and
nobody but me dares talk about it," Pamuk, 54, told a Swiss magazine
in February 2005.

The remarks, which sparked outrage in Turkey, prompted a public
prosecutor to file charges against Pamuk for denigrating the country’s
national identity.

The charges were dropped early in 2006, but the damage had been done.

Death threats followed, and a provincial official even ordered the
destruction of Pamuk’s books — a move nullified by the government,
touchy on rights issues as it strives to make Turkey a full member
of the European Union.

Torn between his political dissidence and his desire to see Turkey in
the EU, Pamuk said he was irked to see the country’s many opponents
in Europe using his court case to argue against Turkey’s membership.

The country’s decades-old attempts to become fully European,
accompanied by clashes between Islam and secularism and tradition
and modernity, and the often painful social and psychological impact
of the aggressive westernization that followed the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, form the core of Pamuk’s writing.

Born on June 7, 1952 into a wealthy, westernized family, Pamuk gave up
architecture studies at the age of 23 and devoted himself to writing.

He published his prize-winning first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons,
seven years later.

Pamuk mostly shuns the public eye, chain-smoking and writing for long
hours in an Istanbul flat overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus
linking Europe and Asia.

Often casually dressed with jacket over T-shirt, his boyish appearance
offset by greying hair and thick glasses, Pamuk talks a mile a minute,
the words spilling out in bursts as he grimaces and gesticulates.

He first drew the ire of the state in the mid-1990s when he denounced
the treatment of the Kurdish minority as the army waged a heavy-handed
campaign to suppress a bloody separatist insurgency in the south-east.

The government extended an olive branch in 1998, offering him the
accolade of "Artist of the State," but Pamuk rejected the honour.

By then, he had become the country’s best-selling author. His sixth
novel, My Name Is Red, brought him international fame and a slew
of awards.

His books, translated into 32 languages, are: Cevdet Bey and His Sons
(1982), The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985), The Black
Book (1990), The New Life (1994), My Name Is Red (1998), Snow (2002)
and Istanbul (2003).