The 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

Professor Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, made the announcement at the Academy in the old town of Stockholm.

Professor Engdahl said Pamuk "has renewed the contemporary novel in a remarkable way, and the main prerequisite for his creativity has been, in an interesting way, the city, his city of birth, his home city, Istanbul."

"He is a unique writer," he said.

Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 into a middle class family in Istanbul. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, journalism at Istanbul University and between 1985 and 1988 was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York.

According to the Swedish Academy, "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."

"Pamuk's writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles. The issue appears in his novel Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1995)��in the Black Book, he also develops his very particular relationship with the art of story-telling which means that the stories link to one another in a labyrinthic fashion, so you can not really find a way out of the novel, once you're in it you're stuck with it," Professor Engdahl said.

Pamuk has also written about growing up in Istanbul. ?stanbul: Hat?ralar Ve ?ehir (2003: Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2006) is a boyhood memoir infused with Turkish literary and cultural history. He has also written about contemporary political and religious conflicts that characterize Turkish society.

The Swedish Academy also noted that in his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda.

By Chen Xuefei, People's Daily Online Correspondent in Stockholm.