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Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk, who last year had charges brought against him by his own government for “insulting Turkishness,” is the first Turkish writer to win the award. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Read about the prize on Aljazeera and more about the author on Wikipedia.
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Winners of the 2006 Quill Book Awards were recently announced with Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings from the Humor category winning Book of the Year. The awards are the first literary prizes to be based on popularity. Winners were chosen through reader votes cast on the MSNBC website.

2006 winners:

• Book of the Year - Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings by Tyler Perry (Humor)
• Debut Author of the Year - Julie Powell for Julie & Julia (Cooking)
• Children’s Chapter Book/Middle Grade - The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
• Young Adult/Teen - Eldest by Christopher Paolini
• General Fiction - A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
• Cooking - Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats: A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners by Rachael Ray
• History/Current Events/Politics - An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore

For a full list of winners, go to thequills.org.

Some of last year’s Quill winners were Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book of the Year) and The Historian author Elizabeth Kostova (Debut Author of the Year).
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