奥罕·帕慕克是享誉国际文坛的土耳其作家，评论家多将他与普鲁斯特、托马斯·曼、博尔赫斯等大师相提并论，获得诺贝尔文学奖对他来说乃是实至名归。评委会称帕穆克的作品“在寻找故乡的忧郁灵魂时，发现了文化冲突和融合中的新的象征”。 不过，在选评时，评奖委员会对他是否能获奖曾充满争议，其原因是：他在今年初公开发表言论，称20世纪对亚美尼亚和库尔德人的种族屠杀事件中土耳其有罪，帕慕克因此将被土耳其送上法庭。
相关链接 ： 美国七旬翁获诺贝尔经济学奖
Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature on Thursday.
Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faced trial this year for insulting his country, won the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature on Thursday in a decision some critics called politically charged.
In a what was seen as a test case for freedom of speech in Turkey, Pamuk was tried for insulting "Turkishness" after telling a Swiss paper last year that 1 million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War I and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades.
Though the court dismissed the charges on a technicality, other writers and journalists are still being prosecuted under the article and can face a jail sentence of up to three years.
"With all due respect to Orhan Pamuk, whose books I read and like, I believe his comments on the Armenian genocide have been influential in his winning this prize," said Suat Kiniklioglu, an Ankara-based political analyst.
"There is a political dimension to all this. I do not believe he was chosen purely on the basis of his artistic capacity," Kiniklioglu said.
Pamuk, 54, shot to fame with novels that explore Turkey's complex identity through its rich imperial past.
But his criticism of modern Turkey's failure to confront darker episodes of that past has turned him more recently into a symbol of free thought both for the literary world and for the European Union, which Ankara wants to join.
"What I said is not an insult, it is the truth. But what if it is wrong? Right or wrong, do people not have the right to express their ideas peacefully?" Pamuk asked during the trial.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn celebrated Pamuk's award as a triumph for free speech.
"Today's Nobel Prize is good news for world literature, but also good news for artistic freedom and for freedom of expression," he said in a statement.
(Agencies)
Vocabulary:
Armenian: 亚美尼亚人
genocide: *
identity: 特征