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Pamuk’s PEN speech

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who faced trial in Istanbul a few months ago for his comments about the Armenian genocide, delivered the first PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture on April 25 at the PEN World Voices festival. In the address, published by The New York Review of Books, Pamuk remembers ferrying Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul in 1985, which they visited on behalf of PEN to look into human rights abuses against writers.

Says Pamuk: “As we took Miller and Pinter by taxi from appointment to appointment through the Istanbul traffic, I remember how we discussed the street vendors, the horse carts, the cinema posters, and the scarfless and scarf-wearing women that are always so interesting to Western observers. But I clearly remember one image: at one end of a very long corridor in the Istanbul Hilton, my friend and I are whispering to each other with some agitation, while at the other end, Miller and Pinter are whispering in the shadows with the same dark intensity. This image remained engraved in my troubled mind, I think, because it illustrated the great distance between our complicated histories and theirs, while suggesting at the same time that a consoling solidarity among writers was possible.”

(Thanks to maudnewton.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for Pamuk’s speech

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