Nobel winners get prizes in pomp-filled cermony

Stockholm, Dec 11: Acclaimed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has said writing made him childishly happy as he and six American academics received their Nobel prizes in Stockholm.

Some 1,600 guests watched Pamuk and the laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics receive medals from King Carl XIV Gustaf yesterday.

''I still have that feeling of childish joy and happiness whenever I write,'' said the novelist who earlier this year went on trial for insulting Turkey. The case was later dropped on a technicality.

''I write to pursue all that childish happiness, and that is why for me literature and writing are inextricably linked with happiness -- or the lack of it, unhappiness,'' he said.

Pamuk, accompanied by his 15-year-old daughter, joked that he should have won the award long before adulthood, so he could have enjoyed the ''princely'' feeling of adult approval all his life.

Earlier yesterday, ''banker to the poor'' Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for a powerful grassroots campaign to relieve poverty in Bangladesh.

Physics laureates John Mather and George Smoot, who along with the other science winners extended the recent American dominance of the science and economics prizes, won for discovering a type of radiation that gave clues to the origin and age of the universe.

For Chemistry laureate Roger Kornberg, this was his second Nobel ceremony. His award for showing how cells copy genes, a process essential to how cells develop and to life itself, came 47 years after he watched his father, Arthur, awarded the medicine Nobel in Stockholm for gene work.

Medicine prizewinner Craig Mello, who with Andrew Fire won for discovering how genes can be ''silenced'' or kept from expression, was the youngest laureate at 46.

Economics laureate Edmund Phelps, who told the banquet he was ''something of a showoff'' when he was young -- and stayed that way into adulthood -- won for research into the interplay between inflation and employment.

The Nobels, each worth 10 million Swedish crowns (1.47 million dollar) and deemed the world's most prestigious accolades in science and literature, have been handed out since 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

This year's prizes were announced in October.

REUTERS