NOVELIST ORHAN PAMUK RETURNS TO TURKEY FOR 1ST TIME SINCE WINNING NOBEL PRIZE

Associated Press Worldstream
December 1, 2006 Friday 1:21 PM GMT

Novelist Orhan Pamuk returned on Friday to Turkey for the first time
since winning the Nobel prize for literature, and he said the award
would not change his life.

"I am attached to my desk, to writing, to working and to my old
habits," Pamuk told journalists at the airport. "I will continue to
be the novelist Orhan that you all know."

Pamuk, a fellow at Columbia University in New York City, was in the
United States when he won the prize in October.

He said he would stay in Istanbul for three or four days before
traveling to Stockholm, Sweden with his daughter, to receive his prize.

Pamuk, author of novels such as "Snow" and "My Name is Red," was
tried earlier this year on charges of insulting his country.

He was tried after a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers accused Pamuk
of the crime of "insulting Turkishness" after the novelist told a
Swiss newspaper that "30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were
killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it."

The charges were dropped over a technicality.

The European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, is pressing the
country to change the law, which has been used to charge Pamuk and
dozens of other writers, academics and journalists.