The 54-year-old novelist, easily Turkey's most famous writer, was put on trial after giving an interview to a Swiss newspaper in which he talked about the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War and the deaths of some 30,000 Kurdish separatists in the 1980s and 1990s. Charges against him were subsequently dropped.

The freedom-of-speech trial only further enhanced Pamuk's claims on the world's most prestigious literary prize. Although the Swedish Academy's deliberations always take place amid intense secrecy, he was the overwhelming favourite to win this year's award among the bookies and the literary pundits.

In the citation, the academy's judges said that Pamuk had "enlarged the roots of the contemporary novel" through his links with both western and eastern literature.

Those links - and the dilemmas such a mixed identity poses - are indeed the key to Pamuk's novels. "I am the servant of the grand art of the novel and in that sense am European," he has said. "On the other hand I look through my Turkish window and try to breathe everything in from there - and that's what goes in my novels."

What that means in practice is that Pamuk, while massively popular and Turkey's only novelist with a worldwide reputation, regularly finds himself antagonising his compatriots. The Left accuse him of selling out to Europe, the Right for attacking human rights abuses, Muslims for portraying them as killers.

Pamuk said he was shocked and happy to have the prize. "I am very happy and honoured. I am very satisfied," he said. "It'll be fun."

From his 1985 breakthrough novel The White Castle onwards, Pamuk's writing picks apart the historical strands of Turkish identity. Although Snow, his last novel, with its military coup, Islamic extremists, Kurdish nationalists, recalcitrant intellectuals and state-tamed media, was an overtly political look at whether Turkey was heading for civil war, his work is usually more subtly allegorical.

Pamuk was born in 1952 into a westernised, prosperous secular family in Istanbul.

Although not a practising Muslim, Pamuk felt that modernisation had created a spiritual void in Turkish society, cutting it off from its past by such reforms as replacing Arabic with a Latin alphabet.

Pamuk found himself drawn back to the kind of Turkish past, to the old Istanbul, well off the tourist trail, about which he has always written superbly.

From a childhood between two worlds, Pamuk has emerged as the kind of writer who can explain one of them to the other: East to West, fundamentalist to secular, past to present. And at noon yesterday, at least one of those worlds rewarded him for it.

The works

THE WHITE CASTLE

A young Venetian scholar, captured by pirates in the 17th century, is put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, and bought by a Turkish savant, who looks like him and who is eager to learn about advances in the West.

SNOW

A Turkish poet travels from exile in Germany to Kars, a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires, where he is to report on elections. A politically sensitive novel, publishers hid most of its first print-run in case it was banned.

MY NAME IS RED

Both a murder mystery set in late-16th century Istanbul and a meditation on the East-West divide, Pamuk's most popular novel with western readers starts when the Sultan secretly commissions a great book to celebrate his life and empire.

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES OF A CITY

Pamuk's love affair with the city that has, apart from three years in New York, been his home for all his life, explaining everything about it that induces in him a feeling of hüzün - a word meaning a collective melancholy.