Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
FRANKFURT, Oct 18 (AFP) - Controversial political authors top the bill at the 57th annual Frankfurt book fair which officially opens on Tuesday with Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk receiving Germany's highest literary honour.
This year's guest of honour at the fair, Korea, is represented by 62 mainly South Korean authors, many of whom have suffered in the struggle for reunification of the divided peninsula while Pamuk risks a jail sentence in his homeland.
He told the German press this week that winning the prestigious German publishers' peace prize made him smile, given the storm he has unleashed with his remarks about the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.
"There is a certain irony, given the political light in which this prize is viewed both in Turkey and in Germany. It is almost as though I should not be proud of the literary quality of my work," he told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.
"It is a good thing I recently wrote a deliberately political novel," Pamuk added, referring to his seventh novel "Snow", a bestseller that looks at the clash between the collective culture and the longing for personal identity in the Muslim world.
Pamuk, who says "writing is my religion", has found that as his fame has grown he has become a figurehead for Turkey and its problems.
He outraged the Turkish authorities by telling a Swiss newspaper that "one million Armenians and Turks were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it."
He is due to appear in court in December on charges of denigrating Turkish national identity but has refused to retract his remarks.
The past recipients of the peace prize include the late feminist icon Susan Sontag who won it in 2003, at a time when she was considered a traitor in the United States for her hard-hitting criticism of the invasion of Iraq.
While many of the authors featured in Frankfurt already have an international profile, most of the Korean authors are new to European audiences.
"Korea is an unknown country in Europe. Korean culture is overshadowed by Japan and China," said Hwang Chi-Woo, the author acting as director of the guest of honour delegation.
Frankfurt remains the world's most important book fair and will this year see the release of some 104,000 new titles.
These include the German translation of the latest offering by Tom Wolfe, a hero of the 1970s "new journalism" movement who at 74 remains true to his early, breathless style, judging by extracts of "I Am Charlotte Simmons".
The book fair almost coincides with the worldwide release last Friday of the latest title in the Asterix comic series, "Asterix and the Falling Sky".
With an initial run of eight million -- 2.5 million of them on sale in Germany alone -- Albert Uderzo's latest effort may well have broken the record for a first print run of any comic book ever published.
But in Germany, as in most other countries, reviews of the thinly veiled satire of US President George W. Bush and his administration have been lukewarm at best.
Uderzo is among a host of well-known authors who will attend the fair, which opens on Wednesday and ends on Sunday.
Publishers are bringing out feminist writer Margaret Atwood alongside top-selling English authors Nick Hornby and Ken Follett, as well as the Dutch poet, novelist and playwright Cees Nooteboom.
Harold Pinter, the 75-year-old English playwright who won the Nobel Literature Prize last week, is not coming to Frankfurt but his achievement is expected to be a talking point and his books a big attraction.
The prize always makes for a boost in sales and readers last year snapped up 240,000 copies of Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek's works within days after she won the prize.
Another Austrian, Arno Geiger, on Monday became the first recipient of a new literature gong, the German Book Prize, that is intended to be the German-speaking world's equivalent of the prestigious Booker prize.
Geiger, 37, is a member of Austria's avant garde literary movement, and won the prize for his fourth novel, a family saga of which the title translates in English as "We are doing fine."
The book fair will be officially opened on Tuesday by South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hae-Chan and outgoing German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
ef/gj/wdb
AFPLifestyle-Germany-books-culture
COPYRIGHT 2005 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
