Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of "My Name is Red", "Snow" and half-a-dozen other novels, won the Nobel Literature Prize for a body of work that probes the crossroads of Muslim and Western cultures.
The Swedish Academy said Pamuk "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city (Istanbul) has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
Pamuk said he was honored to be awarded the prize.
"It's such a great honor, such a great pleasure," Pamuk told journalists at Columbia University in New York, where he studied as a visiting scholar in the 1980s. "I'm very happy about the prize."
The boyish Turkish author, who is now a fellow at Columbia, said the award was a cause for celebration not just for him, but his country and culture.
"I think that this is first of all an honour bestowed upon the Turkish language, Turkish culture, Turkey and also recognition of my labours ... my humble devotion to that great art of the novel," he said.
The 54-year-old writer is Turkey's best-known author at home and abroad, but also a political rebel whose pronouncements on his country's history have put its respect for freedom of expression under the international spotlight.
"In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself principally a fiction writer with no political agenda," the Nobel jury noted.
Turkey's decades-old striving to become European -- characterized by clashes between Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity -- along with the painful impact of an aggressive Westernization after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, permeate Pamuk's writing.
Pamuk was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and he took a stand for his Turkish colleague Yasar Kemal when the latter was put on trial in 1995.
Pamuk himself faced prosecution after telling a Swiss newspaper last year that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed during World War I under the Ottoman Turks.
The charges against him sparked widespread international protest, and were dropped earlier this year.
Just hours before the Swedish Academy made its announcement, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a punishable offence to deny that the massacre of Armenians constituted genocide.
He declined to be drawn by reporters' questions on the issue on Thursday.
"This is a time for celebration, for enjoying this, rather than making political comments," he told journalists.
When pushed, he said: "This is a day for celebration, for being positive. I have lots of critical energy deep in me but I'm not going to express it today."
Joy at his achievement was particularly effusive in Turkey.
"It is great happiness for us all that a Turkish writer has won such a prestigious award," Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters.
And French President Jacques Chirac added his voice to the congratulations, saying he was "delighted" Pamuk had won the prize and that his "reflection on society is... intelligent, strong and liberal".
Pamuk is the first Turk to win the prestigious prize, and had been rumoured as one of the frontrunners this year.
A chain-smoker, he mostly shuns the public eye, writing for long hours in an Istanbul flat overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus linking Europe and Asia.
Born in 1952 into a prosperous, secular family, Pamuk was intent on becoming a painter in his youth. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University but later turned to writing and studied journalism in Istanbul.
He published his prize-winning first novel, "Cevdet Bey and His Sons", in 1982, a family chronicle in which he describes the shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western lifestyle.
His second novel, "The House of Silence", came out in 1983, but it was his third book, "The White Castle", published two years later, that gave him an international reputation.
Structured as a historical novel set in 17th century Istanbul, it is "on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with an alien culture," the Swedish Academy said.
With the 2000 book "My Name is Red" -- a love story, murder mystery and discussion on the role of individuality in art -- Pamuk explores the relationship between East and West, describing an artist's different relationship to his work in each culture.
His latest novel is the critically-acclaimed "Snow", set in Turkey's border town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires.
"The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts that characterise Turkish society of our day," the Academy commented.
Pamuk will take home the prize sum of 10 million kronor (1.07 million euros, 1.37 million dollars).
He will receive the Nobel Prize, which also consists of a gold medal and a diploma, from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
by Pia Ohlin
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