After all those years of failing to pick the winner (see my blog “Trilling with the Quills”), I finally got it right: Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel prize in literature. And not a moment too soon: Pamak has been deeply at odds with his own government for speaking out forthrightly about the Armenian genocide it does not choose to acknowledge, and the prize gives international weight to his struggle for free speech and national responsibility. Over the years, we have heard increasingly that the Nobel prize has become politicized, with some winners evidently picked because they fit an agenda. I want to beg that, appearance notwithstanding, Pamak doesn’t fit that category. He’s a lyric, nuanced writer who does what great writers all do: he opens up windows, shaking our beliefs and bringing us a new world. Let other winners grind their axes or fill their little niches; Pamak calls to mind giants like Russian poet Osip Mandelstam or Spanish poet Federico García Lorca; without writing rhetoric, without turning politician himself, he offers provocative and affecting fiction that upends society. It’s good to be reminded, as we surface from our escapist reading jags, that literature can make a difference.