Turkish Novelist Denounces Government at Book Fair

By MOTOKO RICH writing in the New York Times, Published: October 15, 2008

FRANKFURT — Orhan Pamuk, (pic left), the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, forcefully denounced the Turkish government for its treatment of writers, speaking at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday evening as the president of Turkey sat listening.

Every year, a nation is chosen to be guest of honor at the fair, an annual ritual of the international publishing industry, and this year it is Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of publishers, editors, agents and authors are gathered here from 100 countries to talk about books and negotiate deals in what has become the most important annual event on the book-publishing calendar.

At Tuesday’s opening ceremony in a packed auditorium, Mr. Pamuk spoke quietly but intensely as Abdullah Gul, the president of Turkey, sat in the audience. “A century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into prison or killing them or branding them as traitors and sending them into exile, and continuously denigrating them in the press — none of this has enriched Turkish literature,” Mr. Pamuk said. “It has only made it poorer.”

Mr. Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, was the subject of criminal charges of “insulting Turkishness” after giving a 2005 interview to a magazine in which he condemned the genocide against Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I and the killing of Kurds by Turkey in the 1980s. The charges were dropped, but many nationalists have not forgiven Mr. Pamuk.