Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, will receive the University’s inaugural Distinguished Humanist Medal.
The award — which includes a cash prize of $15,000 — is supported by the Center for the Humanities and International and Area Studies, both in Arts & Sciences. It will be given biannually to a distinguished scholar, writer or artist whose career merits special recognition for excellence and courage.
Pamuk will receive the medal and make a formal address during the fifth annual faculty book colloquium at 4 p.m. Nov. 27 in Graham Chapel. Titled “Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors,” the colloquium honors the work of scholars from across the arts and sciences disciplines.
Pamuk’s speech will be published in the University’s literary journal, Belles Lettres. Pamuk also will conduct a question-and-answer session before a select audience at Hurst Lounge the afternoon of his visit. Text from the session is scheduled to be published in 2007 in the new graduate student online publication, Arch.
“Pamuk was chosen for the award late last spring in consultation with other faculty, well before he won the Nobel Prize,” said Gerald Early, Ph.D., the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences and director of the Center for the Humanities.
“James Wertsch (the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences and director of International and Area Studies) and David Lawton (professor and chair of English in Arts & Sciences) were especially helpful, as they both know Pamuk’s books very well,” Early noted. “It was felt that Pamuk was not only a brilliant writer whose works provide us with fresh, important perspectives on the divide between East and West, but that his support of free speech in Turkey was a notable act. He was an ideal selection for the prize, and he was happy to accept.”
In addition to Pamuk’s talk, “Celebrating Our Books” will include presentations by John R. Bowen, Ph.D., the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences and author of Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space (2006), and Lingchei Letty Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor of modern Chinese language & literature in Arts & Sciences and author of Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity (2006).
“We bring Orhan Pamuk here not only to honor him for his achievements, but to show how much regard we have for Washington University faculty authors by having them share the stage with a writer of such international eminence,” Early said. “We very much want to showcase our writers and scholars.”
Born in 1952, Pamuk graduated from American Robert College in Istanbul and studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University before earning a degree in journalism from Istanbul University.
At 23, he decided to become a novelist and published his first book, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, seven years later. Now one of Turkey’s most prominent writers, his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Pamuk made international headlines in 2005 when criminal charges were brought against him in Istanbul following his statement that Turkey killed a million people in the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17 and massacred 30,000 Kurds in the late 20th century. Pamuk was indicted on charges the remark amounted to a “public denigration” of Turkish identity, a crime in Turkey. Authors from around the world, including Salman Rushdie and John Updike, spoke out on Pamuk’s behalf. Charges were dropped in January 2006.
In addition to Cevdet Bey, Pamuk wrote The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985) and The Black Book (1990). The New Life (1994), about university students influenced by a mysterious book, is one of the most widely read novels in Turkish literature.
His most recent books include My Name Is Red (1998) — his most popular work in English — about Ottoman and Persian artists, the political novel Snow (2002) and the memoir Istanbul (2005).
Bowen’s research focuses on the role of cultural forms in processes of social change. His first three books — Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (1993), Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture (1999) and Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (2003) — examine issues of religion, culture and politics in Indonesia. In Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, he explores the French government’s 2004 decision to ban Islamic headscarves and other religious signs from public schools.
Chen’s Writing Chinese addresses complex issues surrounding the claim of “Chinese-ness” in our increasingly borderless world. Cutting across geographical boundaries, the work challenges current discussions of hybridity and nationalism by examining the politics of Chinese cultural identity facing writers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States. In the end, Writing Chinese proposes that the aesthetics of hybridization are key to developing a more open, creative and individualized notion of Chinese cultural identity.
The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and RSVPs are strongly encouraged. A reception and book-signing will follow in Holmes Lounge. The reception will include a display of all faculty books published in the past five years. In addition, the Campus Store will display books by all three speakers, all of which will be available for purchase.
For more information, call 935-5576 or e-mail cenhum@artsci.wustl.edu.