Pamuk's international breakthrough came with his third novel, "Beyaz Kale" (1985; "The White Castle", 1992). It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable construction. The story's main character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own reflection. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs an exchange of identities. It is perhaps, on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with an alien culture.

Controversy came close to conviction, when, in February 2004, Pamuk stated that "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey,"
in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper. He was subsequently was charged with "denigrating Turkish identity". Turkey has never officially acknowledged that the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or over a million Armenians, in the early twentieth century amounted to genocide.

The case became a cause célèbre, and even threatened to scupper Turkey's hopes of memebership in the European Union. Following worldwide protests, charges against him were dropped. Though others, before and since, have been charged under the same paragraph of the penal code.

Last year he was awarded the Prix Medicis, one of France's most prestigious foreign literature prizes. He was awarded the prize for his latest novel "Kar" (2002; "Snow", 2005), the very theme of which is the angst about modern Turkish identity, which may have contributed to nationalist elements lashing out at him (He was also the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie).

The story is set in the 1990s near Turkey's eastern border in the town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires. The protagonist, a writer who has been living in exile in Frankfurt, travels to Kars to discover himself and his country. 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.

2006 - Orhan Pamuk 2005 - Harold Pinter 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek 2003 - J.M. Coetzee 2002 - Imre Kertész 2001 - V.S. Naipaul 2000 - Gao Xingjian 1999 - Günter Grass 1998 - José Saramago 1997 - Dario Fo 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska 1995 - Seamus Heaney 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe 1993 - Toni Morrison 1992 - Derek Walcott 1991 - Nadine Gordimer 1990 - Octavio Paz 1989 - Camilo José Cela 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz 1987 - Joseph Brodsky 1986 - Wole Soyinka 1985 - Claude Simon 1984 - Jaroslav Seifert 1983 - William Golding 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez 1981 - Elias Canetti 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz 1979 - Odysseus Elytis 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer 1977 - Vicente Aleixandre 1976 - Saul Bellow 1975 - Eugenio Montale 1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson 1973 - Patrick White 1972 - Heinrich Böll 1971 - Pablo Neruda 1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1969 - Samuel Beckett 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata 1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias 1966 - Samuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs 1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre 1963 - Giorgos Seferis 1962 - John Steinbeck 1961 - Ivo Andric 1960 - Saint-John Perse 1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo 1958 - Boris Pasternak 1957 - Albert Camus 1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez 1955 - Halldór Laxness 1954 - Ernest Hemingway

1953 - Winston Churchill 1952 - François Mauriac 1951 - Pär Lagerkvist 1950 - Bertrand Russell 1949 - William Faulkner 1948 - T.S. Eliot 1947 - André Gide 1946 - Hermann Hesse 1945 - Gabriela Mistral 1944 - Johannes V. Jensen 1943 - No prize awarded 1942 - No prize awarded 1941 - No prize awarded 1940 - No prize awarded 1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1938 - Pearl Buck 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard 1936 - Eugene O'Neill 1935 - No prize awarded 1934 - Luigi Pirandello 1933 - Ivan Bunin 1932 - John Galsworthy 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt 1930 - Sinclair Lewis 1929 - Thomas Mann 1928 - Sigrid Undset 1927 - Henri Bergson 1926 - Grazia Deledda 1925 - George Bernard Shaw 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont 1923 - William Butler Yeats 1922 - Jacinto Benavente 1921 - Anatole France 1920 - Knut Hamsun 1919 - Carl Spitteler 1918 - No prize awarded 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam 1915 - Romain Rolland 1914 - No prize awarded 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck 1910 - Paul Heyse 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf 1908 - Rudolf Eucken 1907 - Rudyard Kipling 1906 - Giosuè Carducci 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1902 - Theodor Mommsen 1901 - Sully Prudhomme