Pamuk was awarded the German Book Trade's Peace Prize in 2005 Image: AP
Often casually dressed with jacket over T-shirt, his boyish appearance offset by graying hair and thick glasses, Pamuk talks a mile a minute, the words spilling out in bursts as he grimaces and gesticulates. Pamuk mostly shuns the public eye, chain-smoking and writing for long hours in an Istanbul flat overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus linking Europe and Asia. He published his prize-winning first novel, "Cevdet Bey and His Sons," seven years later.
The country's decades-old attempts to become fully European, accompanied by clashes between Islam and secularism and tradition and modernity, and the often painful social and psychological impact of the aggressive westernization that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, form the core of Pamuk's writing.īorn on Jinto a wealthy, westernized family, Pamuk gave up architecture studies at the age of 23 and devoted himself to writing. Torn between his political dissidence and his desire to see Turkey in the EU, Pamuk said he was irked to see the country's many opponents in Europe using his court case to argue against Turkey's membership. Pamuk writes with a passion about his hometown, Istanbul Image: AP Death threats followed, and a provincial official even ordered the destruction of Pamuk's books - a move nullified by the government, touchy on rights issues as it strives to make Turkey a full member of the European Union. The charges were dropped early in 2006, but the damage had been done.
The remarks, which sparked outrage in Turkey, prompted a public prosecutor to file charges against Pamuk for denigrating the country's national identity. "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it," Pamuk, 54, told a Swiss magazine in February 2005. Recent statements on both the situation of Turkey's Kurds and the killings of Armenians in the early years of the 20th century turned Pamuk into a controversial figure. The 54-year-old writer is Turkey's best-known author at home and abroad, but also a straight-talking rebel whose views on his country's history have caused a storm both at home and abroad. The jury said Pamuk "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city (Istanbul) has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
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