Turkey stands at the cross-roads of numerous world cultures and empires--Europe to the West, Arabia and Egypt to the South, and Persia to the East--while itself being a part of the ancient Byzantium civilisation. Istanbul, Constantinople, and the many names and faces this great metropolis has acquired over millennia lies at the heart of the works of this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk. Only 54, Pamuk is one of the youngest recipients in this genre. The Nobel Committee neatly summed up his lifetime achievement by declaring that "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city [Istanbul he] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

The central, recurring theme of Pamuk's works is the clash of the old, magnificent civilizations. His works have received both critical and commercial success inside and outside Turkey. Leaving his predecessor, the great storyteller, Yashar Kemal, behind, Orhan goes a step further in 'questioning' and exploring the identity and transformation of Turkey from Ottoman times.

Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul into a well-off westernized family. Like Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo, Pamuk has spent almost his entire life in his native city, Istanbul. Orhan was initially trained as an architect, but later gave up architecture for full-time writing. It was his The White Castle that first attracted critical attention. However, by then he had already become a 'publishing phenomenon.'

The White Castle is a wonderful tale of how the East learns from the West. A young Italian scholar captured by pirates is sold to a Turkish savant who wants to learn about western scientific developments. Pamuk's genius as a master storyteller was established in his My Name is Red. Although comparisons are made with Calvino and Eco, this is a novel that is very much Pamuk's own. With stories within stories, it unfolds like The Arabian Nights and brings back to life the times of the Ottoman Empire from the 1590s.

The Ottoman-Turkish legacy doesn't stop here. In The Black Book, Orhan narrates the story of an Istanbul lawyer whose pursuit of the cause of his wife's death takes its readers on a journey into contemporary Istanbul. The New Life--incidentally the fastest selling title in Turkish history--brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the grand Anatolia as we see how Osman, a young university student, becomes obsessed with a magical book that addresses the dangerous nature of love and the self.

Interpreting Turkey and its past may have brought Orhan national and international accolades, but it came at a cost. The book Snow boldly raised the question of Turkish-perpetrated genocides of the Armenian and Kurdish nations during the First World War--a taboo subject in contemporary Turkey. The authorities promptly put him on trial for "publicly denigrating Turkishness." Fortunately, Orhan survived the ordeal.

The recurring theme of Orhan's novels is Istanbul. The city is his obsession, tinged with a melancholia akin to that of the great Mughal poets, Mir, Sauda, and Mir Hasan, who, like Orhan, were also born at a time when the old, glorious order was decaying..

Pamuk's work raises singular questions: How will modern Turkey strike a balance between Secularism and Islam? What relevance does its Ottoman past have that can reflect on the present and the future? But like a master storyteller Orhan refuses to give easy answers. He lets the reader form their view.

Now that Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, are there any more worthy writers from that part of the world? Should one dare a prediction? Perhaps it'll be the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. That's the subject matter of another day.

Asrar Chowdhury teaches Economics at Jahangirnagar University