Pamuk, Desai win Nobel, Booker prizes

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (CNN) -- Turkish author Orham Pamuk, who has clashed with his country's government and was taken to court for "insulting Turkishness," has won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Nobel Web site said Thursday that Pamuk "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

The decision, which surprised few, drew a brief but intense round of applause when Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish Academy, announced the name, The Associated Press reported. Pamuk's novels include "Snow" and "My Name Is Red."

The choice of 54-year-old Istanbul-born Pamuk comes during a political controversy involving Turkey and the massacre of Armenians during World War I in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

It is widely believed that a Armenians were the victims of genocide during that period. However, Turkey and many Turkish citizens vehemently disagree with that assessment. They say Armenians as well as Turks were killed because of warfare, not because of a genocidal movement.

Pamuk, a widely-known known author whose works have been translated into many languages, went on trial for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.

"Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it," he said in the interview.

The issue was live in France Thursday, where French lawmakers in the lower house of parliament passed a bill making it a crime deny that the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks were genocide.

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 have his name catapulted onto the global stage, see out-of-print works returned into circulation and a sales boost.

He will also receive a 10 million kronor ($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.

Last year's winner was British playwright Harold Pinter, a vociferous critic of U.S. foreign policy. That award triggered accusations that the Swedish Academy was anti-American, left-leaning and politically motivated.


LONDON, Oct. 10 — The novelist Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for “The Inheritance of Loss,” a novel that examines identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.

At 35, Ms. Desai is the youngest woman ever to win the Booker, Britain’s best-known literary award. The prize, awarded annually to a novelist from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country, comes with a check for £50,000, or about $93,000, and a guaranteed increase in visibility and sales.

This year’s roster of six finalists was considered surprising because the Booker judges, led by the writer Hermione Lee, chose relative unknowns from a list of 112 books over authors like Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer and Barry Unsworth. But in a speech at the Booker Prize ceremony at the Guildhall in London’s business district, Ms. Lee said the judges had merely selected “the six we were most passionate about.”

She called Ms. Desai’s book “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.”

“The Inheritance of Loss,” published by Grove Press in the United States, is set in a remote corner of India against the backdrop of growing Nepalese unrest, and in the streets of Manhattan, where illegal immigrants try to make a living while eluding the authorities. It is Ms. Desai’s second book and concerns itself with what she calls “the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner.”

Ms. Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been a Booker finalist three times, but has not won. They are the first mother-daughter team of nominees in the prize’s 37-year history.

Accepting the award, Kiran Desai said she owed a great deal to her mother, to whom “The Inheritance of Loss” is dedicated, not least because she had written much of the book at her mother’s house. “She’s a very sweet mother, and a very kind mother,” Ms. Desai said. “I owe her such an enormous debt that I can’t express it in any ordinary way.”

The five runners-up each receive £2,500. Other authors on the shortlist of finalists who also wrote about immigration and exile this year included Hisham Matar, whose novel “In the Country of Men” tells the story of a 9-year-old boy grappling with the violence and secrets of Libya in 1979; and Kate Grenville, whose book “The Secret River” describes a British convict’s journey to a new life in Australia in the 19th century.

Also on the shortlist were Edward St. Aubyn for “Mother’s Milk,” a tragicomic novel about addiction and the struggles of raising children in an aristocratic British family fallen on hard times; M. J. Hyland for “Carry Me Down,” whose protagonist is a boy in 1970’s Ireland who believes he has an uncanny gift of intuiting truthfulness; and Sarah Waters for “The Night Watch,” which follows the entwined lives of four Londoners during and after the Blitz.