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A salute to Orhan Pamuk

The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 to 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" — is as much a tribute to his upstanding commitment to freedom of expression and political dissent as it is to his profound explorations of human experience through his many novels. The subject of political controversy in Turkey, where he was charged with "denigrating Turkishness," Mr. Pamuk has had to tread a narrow and slippery plank over an abyss holding twin dangers: the prospect of being seized to become a poster boy for the West and the prospect of being silenced by authoritarian chauvinism within his own country. Like Ka, the poet-protagonist of his novel Snow, the writer saw Turkish politics as something he got entangled with almost by accident. His comments last year on the massacre of 30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians on Turkish soil landed him in court and put him under the international spotlight. The charges were eventually dropped. Mr. Pamuk emphasises through his novels and other writings the inescapably political nature of literature, which does not necessarily represent any specific political identity. "A novelist's politics," this man of great integrity and humanism has noted, offering a rare insight into the problematical literature-politics relationship, "rises from his imagination, from his ability to imagine himself as someone else. This power makes him... the spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard, and whose words are suppressed."

The 54-year-old writer grew up experiencing "a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more western-oriented lifestyle" in a prosperous and secular middle class household in Istanbul. Set initially to become a painter, he studied architecture and then journalism before settling on fiction and full-time writing. His internationally acclaimed novels include his breakthrough work, Beyaz Kala, 1985 (The White Castle, 1992), Kara Kitap, 1990 (The Black Book, 1995), Benim Adim Kirmizi, 2000 (My Name is Red, 2002), and Kar, 2002 (Snow, 2005). Another wonderful work is Istanbul, 2003, part memoir, part cultural history. Mr. Pamuk acknowledges the great traditions of western fiction but is clear that one must liberate oneself from the confines of one's own persona, offering the inspiring thought that the history of the novel "is the history of human liberation." The Pamuk novels, often allusive and complex, set out to explore the intricacies of multiple identities and cultures that post-modern civilisation grapples with. The conflict between European and Islamic values is a recurrent theme in many of his books but, as the Swedish Academy's announcement implies, the Nobel is as much for his rootedness in his beloved Istanbul as it is for his creative discovery of new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures. While Mr. Pamuk has consistently refused to be identified with the politics of post-colonial western elites, especially in the context of the geopolitics of West Asia, he has repeatedly spoken out, through his essays and from various platforms, against growing global intolerance towards minorities and civil rights groups within nations. The new intolerant nationalism, whether it is practised in Turkey or the United States or Germany, is powerfully represented in his fiction. For his success in conveying humanity's truest voice in wonderful works of fiction and seeking to discover what he describes as "life's hidden geometry," this writer richly deserves his Nobel.

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