Orhan Pamuk

He outlines his work as ‘a testimony to the fact that East and West combine culture gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way.’ Pamuk himself is a strong supporter of Turkey’s European Union membership, believing that his country’s future lies in the bloc.

Last year, Pamuk was charged by Turkish authorities with the ‘public denigrating of Turkish identity’ after his statement about the official silence surrounding the massacre of more than a million Armenians by Turks in 1915 and the deaths of tens of thousands of the Kurdish minority in more recent conflicts. The charges against him were later dropped, when an international clamor obliged Turkey to ‘end’ a high-profile trial that outraged Western observers.

Is it any coincidence that the Swedish Academy in previous years has awarded the same prize to other writers in confict with their own goverments? Last year the Academy honored the British playwright Harold Pinter, who in his acceptance speech launched an attack on US foreign policy and who has publicly slammed his own country’s involvement in the Iraq war. The 2004 winner was Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria’s conservative politicians.

The permanent secretary of the Academy, Dr Horace Engdahl, clarified that Pamuk’s comments on Turkey had not affected the decision.

‘It could, of course, lead to some political turbulence, but we are not interested in that... He is a controversial person in his own country, but on the other hand, so are almost all of our prize winners.’
He explained that Pamuk was selected because he had ‘enlarged the roots of the contemporary novel’ through his links to both Western and Eastern culture.

Pamuk himself stressed, when he arrived in New York, where he is teaching at Columbia University, that he is, above all else, a writer, not a politician. The highest accolade came from his colleagues in the West, because, as they said Pamuk has been ‘willing to defy those who would silence free speech.’

By Dimitris Pappas
Dimitris Pappas is a journalist.