Literature is powerful because it is also about politics. Words have the power to disturb the settled complacency of the status quo. So it is hardly surprising Literature Nobels have a “political” resonance. The politics behind this year’s literature laureate — Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk — is excellent. It comes at a time when the faultlines between the Islamic world and the West appear pronounced. But if Pamuk explores the conflict between two contending value systems, he is also a bridge between them. The Swedish Academy specifically noted this dualism when it stated that Pamuk “has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.

Pamuk is intensely Turkish. Few people have captured the nuances of life in Turkey’s capital city in quite the manner that he has in his Istanbul: Memories of the City. Much like the other great Nobel literary laureate from the Middle East, Naguib Mahfouz, did in his masterly The Cairo Trilogy, Pamuk explored with great intimacy the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family in his Cevdet Bey and His Sons. But like all outstanding writers he has also the capacity to perceive the warts, and the courage to write about them. Not many writers today have tested the limits of their country’s freedom in quite the manner Pamuk has. His observation to a Swiss newspaper that “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it” prompted criminal charges to be brought against him for “publicly denigrating Turkishness”. But Pamuk saw it differently. For him, the only hope of Turkey coming to terms with its history is to be able to “talk about the past”. He was let off on a technicality, helped in part by the fact the European Union was at that very point beginning a review of the Turkish justice system.

Pamuk’s work advances, not hinders, Turkey’s case for admission into the EU. He has through his work and advocacy forced not just Turkey to look within, but the Europeans to confront their own prejudices. Great literature and good politics.