Nobel laureate Pamuk chronicles Ottoman past

ANKARA, Oct 12 (Reuters) Orhan Pamuk, who today became the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, 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 also turned Pamuk more recently into a symbol of free thought both for the literary world and for the European Union, which Ankara wants to join.

The bespectacled, boyish-looking Pamuk, 54, went on trial last year on charges of insulting Turkish national identity under a controversial article of the country's penal code strongly criticised by the EU.

Pamuk had upset nationalists by telling a Swiss newspaper that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War One and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades.

Though the court dismissed the charges against Pamuk on a technicality, other writers and journalists are still being prosecuted under the article and could face a jail sentence of up to three years.

In a curious twist of irony, the Swedish Academy declared Pamuk winner of the 2006 literature prize on a day when, to Turkey's fury, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.

Ankara says there was no genocide but that large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict raging at that time as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

The Pamuk trial was a big embarrassment for Turkey's pro-Western government, which has introduced a flurry of human rights reforms and last year finally began EU accession talks.

At the height of the nationalist hysteria over his comments, one provincial official called for Pamuk's books to be burnt.

SPEAKING TRUTH ''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.

His work has been translated into many languages and has earned him a growing fan club in Europe, America and beyond.

In his novels, Pamuk chronicles the clash between past and present, East and West, secularism and Islamism, often against the colourful backdrop of his native Istanbul, a city which straddles Europe and Asia.

In ''The White Castle'', he explores the complex relationship between a 17th century Ottoman Muslim master and his Italian Christian slave.

''Snow'', his most political work to date, Pamuk tells the tale of a poet-journalist who returns from exile in Germany and travels to the eastern Turkish city of Kars to investigate the suicides of a number of pious, young headscarved women.

It is critical of both Westerners and Islamists in Turkey.

His most recent work, ''Istanbul: Memories of a City'', intersperses personal reminiscences of childhood and youth with reflections on the city's Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman past.

''Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am,'' he says.

Pamuk was born into a wealthy, Westernised family in Istanbul in 1952. He speaks fluent English and spent several years as a Columbia University scholar in the United States.

He has pioneered a style of writing that combines traditional story-telling with experimental devices and a very modern preoccupation with identity and fears of a ''clash of civilisations''.

Reuters MQA VV1950