By host Tom Ashbrook:

To the world’s elite club of Nobel Prize winners for Literature — Harold Pinter, Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipal, Octavio Paz and more — add this name: Orhan Pamuk. The announcement from the Swedish Academy yesterday cites the Turkish novelist for his grasp of the “clash and interlacing of cultures.”

No kidding. Only months ago, Orhan Pamuk — cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, straddling East and West, Islam and secularism — stood in the dock in Turkey, on criminal charges of insulting the Turkish identity. At a fraught moment between Islam and the West, the Nobel committee’s choice is a bell ringer.

Hear about the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Orhan Pamuk and the artist in the clash of East and West.

Guests:

Orhan Pamuk, author of numerous books including “Snow,” “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” and
“My Name is Red.” He has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Maureen Freely, translator of Orhan Pamuk

Stephen Kinzer, New York Times reporter, author of Crescent & Star: Turkey, Between two Worlds

Muge Sokmen, Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of the Turkish PEN.