Pamuk, a visiting professor at Columbia University, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he was overjoyed by the award and accepted it not just as “a personal honour, but as an honour bestowed upon the Turkish literature and culture I represent.”

The author did have one complaint: The Swedish Academy announced the prize at 7 am, EDT. “They called and woke me up, so I was a bit sleepy,” said the 54-year-old Pamuk, adding that he had no immediate plans to celebrate, but looked forward to being with friends back in Turkey.

The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for “insulting Turkishness” made headlines worldwide, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a blunt opponent of his country’s involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria’s conservative politicians and social class, was the 2004 winner.

Pamuk, whose novels include Snow and My Name Is Red, was charged last year for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey’s overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.

“Thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” he said in the interview. The controversy came at a particularly sensitive time for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. Turkey had recently begun membership talks with the European Union, which harshly criticized the trial. The charges against Pamuk were dropped in January.

“I think that Orhan Pamuk was a splendid choice for the Nobel Prize, not only for the evident literary merit of his work, but because of his courageous defiance of political pieties in Turkey,” historian Ron Chernow, president of the PEN American Center.

Snow, a deeply sad and dreamlike novel, is among the most political of Pamuk’s works. It tells of the despair young women in a small Turkish town feel when the state decrees that they can’t wear their Islamic headscarves at their university, a divisive issue for many in Turkey, where most women cover their hair in the Muslim tradition.

He has spoken up for others in peril. Pamuk was the first Muslim writer to defend Salman Rushdie when Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie to death because of The Satanic Verses.

He himself had little religious upbringing. Growing up in Istanbul, his extended family was wealthy and privileged — his grandfather was an industrialist and built trains for the new nation.

Random House announced today that an additional printing of more than 100,000 has been commissioned for Snow, along with smaller reprintings for My Name Is Red, The Black Book and Istanbul. Within hours of the prize announcement, five of Pamuk’s books were among the top 100 sellers on Amazon.com.

HILLEL ITALIE