|
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wins Nobel prize for
literature
13.10.2006
|
|
|
|
STOCKHOLM ,-- The
selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for
"insulting Turkishness" made headlines worldwide,
continues a trend among Nobel
Novelist Orhan Pamuk, an international symbol of
literary and social conscience, whose poetic,
melancholy
journeys into the soul of his native Turkey have
brought him the many blessings and burdens of public
life, won the Nobel literature prize Thursday.
Pamuk, a fellow at Columbia University, told The
Associated Press in a telephone interview that he
was
overjoyed by the award and accepted it not just as
"a personal honor, but as an honor bestowed upon the
Turkish literature and culture I represent."
The author did have one complaint: The Swedish
Academy announced the prize at 7 a.m., EDT.
"They called and woke me up, so I was a bit sleepy,"
said the 54-year-old Pamuk, adding that he had no
immediate plans to celebrate, but looked forward to
being with friends back in Turkey.
|
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk
Photo: AFP |
"They called and woke me up, so I was a bit sleepy,"
said the 54-year-old Pamuk, adding that he had no
immediate plans to celebrate, but looked forward to
being with friends back in Turkey.
The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for
"insulting Turkishness" made headlines worldwide,
continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking
writers in conflict with their own governments.
British playwright Harold Pinter, a blunt opponent
of his country's involvement in the Iraq war, won
last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of
Austria's conservative politicians and social class,
was the 2004 winner.
Pamuk, whose novels include "Snow" and "My Name Is
Red," was charged last year for telling a Swiss
newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling
to deal with two of the most painful episodes in
recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians
during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a
planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in
Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.
"Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were
killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to
talk about it," he said in the interview.
The controversy came at a particularly sensitive
time for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. Turkey
had recently begun membership talks with the
European Union, which harshly criticized the trial.
The charges against Pamuk were dropped in January.
"I think that Orhan Pamuk was a splendid choice for
the Nobel Prize, not only for the evident literary
merit of his work, but because of his courageous
defiance of political pieties in Turkey," historian
Ron Chernow, president of the PEN American Center,
the U.S. chapter of the international writers-human
rights organization, said in an e-mail to the AP.
Virtually the only Turkish author widely known to
U.S. readers, Pamuk embodies the push and pull
between East and West, between writers and the
state, between what we know and what we want to
know. Pamuk has become a celebrated and resented
reminder of his country's darkest past, like such
Nobel laureates as Germany's Guenter Grass and
Mississippi native William Faulkner, whose tormented
narratives of the American South became models for
Pamuk.
"I have so much respect for Faulkner," Pamuk told
the AP on Thursday. "What Faulkner did was to
combine complicated history with modernist
literature, experimental literature, with an art
that is authentic and new and daring. I have also
tried to do that."
"Snow," a deeply sad and dreamlike novel published
in the United States in 2004, is among the most
political of Pamuk's works. It tells of the despair
young women in a small Turkish town feel when the
state decrees that they can't wear their Islamic
headscarves at their university, a divisive issue
for many in Turkey, where most women cover their
hair in the Muslim tradition.
Many of the educated, liberal Turkish women who read
"Snow," Pamuk said in a 2004 interview with the AP,
"felt I should not pay so much understanding to the
humiliation of a woman who is not allowed to wear a
head scarf."
He has spoken up for others in peril. Pamuk was the
first Muslim writer to defend Salman Rushdie when
Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie
to death because of "The Satanic Verses," a satire
of the Prophet Mohammed published in 1989. Pamuk has
also been supportive of Kurdish rights.
Pamuk himself had little religious upbringing.
Growing up in Istanbul, his extended family was
wealthy and privileged - his grandfather was an
industrialist and built trains for the new nation.
Religion, Pamuk once told the AP, was considered to
be something for the poor and the provincial.
Instead, Pamuk was educated at the American school,
Robert College, founded in the 1860s by secular
Americans, where half the classes were taught in
English. Among the Turkish graduates are prime
ministers and corporate executives.
Pamuk's first novel, "Darkness and Light," came out
in 1979 and was a multigenerational tale about a
wealthy Turkish family in Istanbul. His reputation
grew with "The White Castle" and "The Black Book,"
and his following widened even as his work turned
more surreal and self-conscious, like "My Name Is
Red," a story of forbidden art and palace politics
with a ghoulish opening line, "I am nothing but a
corpse now, a body at the bottom of the well."
Western writers such as Margaret Atwood and John
Updike are among his fans and more than 200,000
copies of "Snow" have sold in the United States
alone. Publisher Random House, Inc., announced
Thursday that an additional printing of more than
100,000 has been commissioned for "Snow," along with
smaller reprintings for "My Name Is Red," "The Black
Book" and the memoir "Istanbul."
Within hours of the Nobel announcement, five of
Pamuk's books were among the top 100 sellers on
Amazon.com.
Pamuk will receive a $1.4 million check, a gold
medal and diploma, and an invitation to a lavish
banquet in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10, the 110th
anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred
Nobel.
AP
The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan".
Others estimate as many as 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan but
unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag is
banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it is
a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey) wikipedia
First world war
massacres | Related
issue:
Armenian Genocide by Turkish Muslims against
Christians
Turkey faces international pressure to recognise
that more than 1 million Armenians were massacred
during a 1915 campaign of ethnic cleansing by
Ottoman Turks. Turkish officials claim that most
deaths were caused by hunger and disease.
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 