Turkey's Pamuk wins Nobel literature prize

Academy head Horace Engdahl said Pamuk’s political situation in Turkey had not affected the decision.

“It could, of course, lead to some political turbulence, but we are not interested in that,” Engdahl said. “He is a controversial person in his own country, but on the other hand, so are almost all of our prize winners.”

He said Pamuk was selected because he had “enlarged the roots of the contemporary novel” through his links to both Western and Eastern culture.

“This means that he has stolen the novel, one can say, from us Westerners and has transformed it to something different from what we have ever seen before,” Engdahl said.

Earlier Thursday, French lawmakers in the National Assembly in Paris approved a bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I amounted to genocide, a move that has infuriated Turkey.

Pamuk has spoken up for other writers in peril. He 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 Muhammad 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 has said, 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 has long been considered a contender for the Nobel prize and he figured high among pundits and bookmakers. His works, written in Turkish, have been translated into other languages, including English, French, Swedish and German.

Pamuk’s prize marked the first time that a writer from a predominantly Muslim country has been honored for literature since 1988, when the award went to Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who died in August.

In its citation, the academy said that “Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first published novel, a family chronicle ... which in the spirit of Thomas Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.”

“Pamuk’s international breakthrough came with his third novel, ’The White Castle.’ It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable construction,” the academy said.

In winning the prize, Pamuk will likely see new interest in his work, although there was little increase in sales for Jelinek and Pinter. Pamuk will also receive a $1.4 million check, a gold medal and diploma, and an invitation to a lavish banquet in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.

MORE FROM BOOKS

Michael Jackson ‘Opus’ book offers rare images

Michael Jackson ‘Opus’ book offers rare images Colum McCann wins national award for fiction ‘The Carrie Diaries’ book cover revealed Karl Rove memoir coming in March Ali Vincent on going from fat to ‘Biggest Loser’ How dog poop led to love for Paula Deen   Add Books headlines to your news reader: