Turkish Novelist Denounces Government at Book Fair

FRANKFURT — Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, publicly and forcefully denounced the Turkish government for its treatment of writers in a speech he gave at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday evening as the president of Turkey sat listening.

Every year, a nation is chosen to be guest of honor at the fair, an annual rite of the international publishing industry, and this year it is Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of publishers, editors, agents and authors are gathered here from 100 countries to talk about and negotiate deals for upcoming books in what has become the most important annual event on the book-publishing calendar.

At Tuesday’s opening ceremony in a packed auditorium, Mr. Pamuk spoke quietly but intensely as Abdullah Gul, the president of Turkey, sat in the audience. “A century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into prison or killing them or branding them as traitors and sending them into exile, and continuously denigrating them in the press — none of this has enriched Turkish literature — it has only made it poorer,” Mr. Pamuk said.

Mr. Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, was the subject of criminal charges of “insulting Turkishness” after giving a 2005 interview to magazine in which he condemned the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey in World War I and the killing of Kurds by Turkey in the 1980s. The charges were dropped, but many nationalists have not forgiven Mr. Pamuk.