20 February 2008
Wednesday 20 February 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Kenan Malik talks to the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, Orhan Pamuk. He discusses the dilemma at the heart of Turkey's identity, and his relationship with Istanbul.
Playlist
Orhan Pamuk
A repeat of last September's 45-minute programme-length interview between Kenan Malik and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, Orhan Pamuk.
Pamuk is Turkey's best-known novelist and the first Turk to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He has been writing for thirty years - though as he recalls on the programme it took him eight years' hard toil to find a publisher to accept his first script.
He became famous in the West for books like The White Castle and My Name is Red which succeed both in evoking Turkey's Ottoman past and addressing questions of East and West, modernity and tradition, Islam and Secularism.
Pamuk himself insists he is only a writer yet he has frequently found himself embroiled in political rows in Turkey - through his self-confessed tendency to speak out about controversial subjects.
Most recently this led to his being prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness" after he commented in a magazine interview that a million Armenians and thirty-thousand Kurds died at the hands of the Ottomans in 1915.
The charges were subsequently dropped but even now Pamuk lives under constant protection.
On Nightwaves Pamuk discusses the themes running through his latest book, a collection of essays and autobiography called Other Colours, the political future of Turkey and the difficulties of balancing the duties of a writer with the moral duty that comes from living in a country in which free speech and political comment can still be a dangerous game.
