The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded yesterday to Orhan Pamuk, a 54-year-old Turkish writer, whose ingeniously constructed novels explore the ambivalent relationship between Turkey and the West. Mr. Pamuk, one of Turkey’s best-selling writers and the only one whose work is regularly published in America, has long been considered a favorite to win the prize. But the Swedish Academy’s decision to honor Mr. Pamuk this year, in the wake of the novelist’s prosecution by the Turkish government for the crime of defaming his country, is also an unmistakable gesture of support for freedom of expression.

Mr. Pamuk, who has been considered one of the world’s leading novelists for at least a decade, was thrust onto a wider stage in 2005. In an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, he complained, “Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” Back home in Turkey, where the genocide of Armenians during World War I remains a taboo subject, Mr. Pamuk’s remarks provoked violent criticism, angry demonstrations, and finally a prosecution under Article 301 of the country’s criminal code, for “publicly denigrating Turkish identity.”

In an essay published in the New Yorker last year, Mr. Pamuk claimed the prosecution as a badge of honor, calling Turkey “a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons.” But the case became an embarrassment to the Turkish government as it pursued membership in the European Union, and in January 2006 the charges against him were dropped.

This year’s prize, then, puts the Turkish government in the awkward position of having to celebrate a writer it only recently tried to put in jail. The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a lukewarm statement of congratulation, saying in part, “For years, it was our public’s expectation to see a Turkish writer awarded the Nobel literature prize.”

But Mr. Pamuk’s nationalist foes continued to attack him yesterday. According to the Associated Press, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who helped to prosecute the novelist, insisted “This prize was not given because of Pamuk’s books, it was given because of his words, because of his Armenian genocide claims … It was given because he belittled our national values, for his recognition of the genocide.” The controversy was surely anticipated by the Swedish Academy, whose citation praised Mr. Pamuk for discovering “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” In recent years, the Academy has awarded the Literature Prize to several authors known for their outspoken political views, including Harold Pinter and Günter Grass.

But politics aside, there can be no doubt that Mr. Pamuk, the author of eight novels and two works of nonfiction, is a highly deserving laureate. Even before the Nobel award, he had won many of the world’s leading literary prizes, including the French Prix Medicis and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. From 1985 to 1988, Mr. Pamuk lived in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Yesterday’s announcement found him back at Columbia, where he is currently a fellow at the Committee on Global Thought. (Mr. Pamuk is the second Columbia scholar to receive a Nobel this week, after Edmund Phelps won the Nobel Prize for Economics on Monday.) At a press conference at Columbia yesterday, Mr. Pamuk said, “This is an honor bestowed on the Turkish language, culture, and Turkey.”

Mr. Pamuk was born to a secular middle-class family in Istanbul in 1952, and much of his work explores the clash between Turkey’s modern, Westernized identity and its Ottoman Muslim past. His first book, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons,” never translated into English, is a realistic novel about three generations of an Istanbul family, and has been compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks.” But it was “The White Castle,” published in Turkish in 1985 and translated into English in 1992, that made Mr. Pamuk internationally famous.

“The White Castle,” which earned comparisons to the fiction of Kafka and Borges, features many of the techniques and themes that have since defined Mr. Pamuk’s work. Set in the 17th century, it is the story of an Italian scholar who is kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave in Constantinople, where he meets a Turkish scholar who seems to be his double. As the novel progresses, the two men move from sharing knowledge to exchanging identities, all while helping the Sultan build a cannon that will destroy his Christian enemies.The novel playfully disclaims any symbolic message. According to Mr. Pamuk’s surrogate narrator, “young people usually more absorbed in issues like politics, activism, East-West relations, or democracy” will find the story dull. But in its exploration of the way East and West, Muslim and Christian, both mirror and misunderstand each other, “The White Castle” is unmistakably a book for our time.

In all his work since, Mr. Pamuk has continued to explore the quandaries of Turkish identity, and to elaborate his narrative style, which combines the premodern techniques of “The Thousand and One Nights” with the postmodern ones of Calvino and Borges. Since 2002, three of Mr. Pamuk’s books have appeared in the United States.”My Name Is Red,” set in the world of 16th-century Turkish painters, centers around the conflict between traditional Islamic art, which forbids representation of human beings, and the new Renaissance techniques of accurate perspective. A murder mystery and a love story, it is at heart another exploration of the gulf between East and West, and the possibility of bridging it. “Snow,” Mr. Pamuk’s most explicitly political novel, is the story of an expatriate poet who returns to present-day Turkey and is swept up in the intrigues of Islamic and Kurdish radicals. His most recent book, “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” is a combination of memoir and city guide, and treats Mr. Pamuk’s favorite themes in an unusually straightforward style. “Istanbul,” in fact, may be the best book for readers new to Pamuk to start with. In his loving meditation on “huzun” or melancholy, which Mr. Pamuk sees as the quintessential Turkish emotion, he shows that he is as much the product of his native city as Dickens was of London: “I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood.”