TURKISH NOVELIST WINS NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
By Jennifer Howard
The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 20, 2006 Friday
The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the
Istanbul-born novelist Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the
melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for
the clash and interlacing of cultures," the Nobel Foundation announced
last week. Mr. Pamuk is a visiting professor of Middle Eastern studies
and writing at Columbia University.
Born in 1952 into a well-heeled family of engineers, Mr. Pamuk has
written 10 books, including the novels Beyaz Kale (1985; translated
into English as The White Castle in 1991); Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998; My
Name Is Red, 2001), and Kar (2002; Snow, 2004), which "becomes a tale
of love and poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the
political and religious conflicts that characterize Turkish society
of our day," the Nobel Foundation said.
"In his home country," the foundation wrote in a statement announcing
the award, "Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though
he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political
agenda. He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly
condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He took a stand for his
Turkish colleague Yasar Kemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995."
In 2005, in a case that attracted widespread international attention,
Mr. Pamuk faced prosecution by the Turkish government "after having
mentioned, in a Swiss newspaper, that 30,000 Kurds and one million
Armenians were killed in Turkey," the foundation noted. Those charges
were subsequently dropped. Another Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak,
faced similar charges last month; that case also was dismissed.
Mr. Pamuk’s work has been handsomely recognized over the years both
in his home country and abroad. His early novels won several Turkish
and foreign literary prizes. More recent accolades include France’s
2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the 2003 International
Impac Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red, and the 2006
Prix Mediterranee Etranger for Snow. Mr. Pamuk has also written a
nonfiction meditation on his hometown, Istanbul: Hatiralar Ve Sehir
(2003; Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2005), which anatomizes "the
melancholy he sees as distinctive for Istanbul and its inhabitants."
A graduate of Istanbul’s Robert College, Mr. Pamuk early on harbored
dreams of becoming an artist. He studied architecture at Istanbul
Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. From
1985 to 1988, he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University,
and was briefly at the University of Iowa. He is an honorary member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.