“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.

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