Turkey: Few interested observers could claim surprise on hearing the name of this year's Nobel Laureate for Literature.
Last year Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was hovering on the brink of a prison sentence. His selection for the prize is a good choice if also to some extent an anticlimactic one, particularly as common sense and world opinion in the face of Turkey's desire to gain EU membership, stopped him going to jail.
Even without a prison sentence, Pamuk's experience made an important point about freedom of expression Turkish-style and it also alerted onlookers, such as the rest of the world, to the way the Turks handle problems.
At 54, Pamuk is one of the younger laureates. He is also well known and widely read in the West - a profile well earned on the strength of some interesting novels, most notably My Name is Red, his finest to date and the work which won him the 2003 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
Pamuk's work is a vital entry point into the world of contemporary Turkey. His understanding of East meets West tensions has been well served by his interest in western culture. My Name is Red is many things: murder mystery and burlesque, but also a detailed study of art and truth and the clash between old and new. Interestingly Pamuk, a sophisticated westernised native of Istanbul, did not ridicule his culture but showcased the rich oriental opulence of it. Violence and humour undercut the narrative, which dazzles and engages for all its intellectual energy.
His win is an interesting one in that it is a victory for literature. Pamuk is a serious writer, sufficiently serious to announce down a phone line to me within minutes of his Impac win: "I am an intellectual who writes good novels, ideas concern me - story is useful." It was a comment he would later repeat in person. No less a critic than writer John Updike has praised his "dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection".
But Pamuk's victory is also a highly political choice, aided no doubt by recent events. In the course of the past 18 months or so, Pamuk, never a natural campaigner, although a writer who has always voiced his opposition to the imprisonment of writers, has become a political figure. In person, he is outspoken, almost capricious.
No one who has met him would be surprised that he spoke his mind in an newspaper interview, informing a Swiss-German journalist in February 2005 that a million Armenians had been massacred in 1915 by the Ottomans and that in more recent history the Turks had killed Kurdish separatists "and no one but me dares to talk about it".
His remarks were seen as an attack on Turkey by one of its more privileged sons, a member of an engineering family whose grandfather owned the Turkish railway. The family fortune was spent in some style by Pamuk's father - not that the young Pamuk was ever other than comfortable.
His remarks in that interview were taken seriously. In ways, the fallout could be compared to that sparked by the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllens-Posten.
Pamuk was denounced; there were calls to ban his books and about this time last year it looked likely that he would be convicted of "insulting and weakening Turkey's national identity". It must have been disturbing for him, but also rather exciting. He is a flamboyant, hyperactive, jumpy character, half cleverest boy in the class, half sage with a demeanour caught somewhere between defiance and impatience.
One minute he is a dreamer consumed by his quasi-metaphysical fiction, the next he has all the gravitas of a public man. His English is formal and correct and according to Turks, his Turkish is also formal and at times academic. His sentences are long, at times spanning a page. He is a writer whose appeal to western readers was, until Erdag Goknar's fine translation of My Name is Red, largely at the mercy of some poor, heavily literal translators.
As a boy, Pamuk wanted to be a painter. His comfortable, upper middle class, secular, "French-influenced" family decided that meant he wanted to study architecture. Pamuk did so, abandoning his studies after two years, during which time he had already been working on a novel.
Nabokov was an early literary influence and Calvino and Borges have remained important to him. He also shares stylistic tendencies with Paul Auster. His first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons, was completed when he was 26. A Buddenbrooks-like performance, it and his second completed novel, The Silent House, have yet to be translated into English.
Pamuk's career in the West began in 1990 with the publication of The White Castle, which had been published in Istanbul in 1979. The sense of panic running through the narrative, which centres on a 17th century Italian scholar turned slave and his Muslim master, draws the reader in. The New Life and The Black Book followed, and quest emerged as a Pamuk theme.
Aside from his political difficulties of last year, Pamuk saw another novel, Snow, receive a mixed critical response while his love for and exasperation with, his native city shimmered through his engaging memoir of sorts, Istanbul.
Not quite a hero - not yet at least - but certainly a good writer, a forthright commentator and an important interpreter of the cultural tango of East and West, Pamuk's prose offers colour, energy, imagination, metaphysics and sufficient contradictions to reassure us that the committee has not simply made a token political decision.
