Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, who was recently charged with the crime of denigrating the Turkish nation when he stated that the campaign against the Armenians by the Turks in the early part of the twentieth century deserved the name of genocide in an interview with a Swiss magazine, has been awarded the Prix Medicis, one of France's most prestigious foreign literature prizes.

He was awarded the prize for his novel "Snow", the very theme of which is the angst about modern Turkish identity, which may have contributed to nationalist elements lashing out at him.

Orhan Pamuk

"Snow", which has been translated into at least a dozen languages, is a complex novel about a Turkish writer and political exile who returns home after 12 years of living abroad to confront his past and the present reality of his homeland.

The 53-year-old Parhuk has been the target of Turkish nationalists and charged with insulting Turkey's national character after he was quoted in a Swiss paper as saying that only he had dared to say that Turkey killed 30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians.

Pamuk was referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire forces of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915-17. While Turkey does not contest the killings, it resolutely denies that it was "genocide."

His reference to "30,000" Kurdish deaths concerned those killed since 1984 in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists.
Pamuk is expected to stand trial on the charges in December and faces up to three years in prison if convicted.