Nobel-prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the Sonning Prize, Denmark's biggest cultural award, the University of Copenhagen said here Monday.

IBNA: According to Xinhua, the biennial prize, which is worth 1 million Danish kroner (around 175,000 U.S. dollars), is awarded by the university to a person deemed to have done commendable work in the service of European culture.

"Orhan Pamuk's greatest contribution to European culture is his overt challenging of the limits placed around it, and his making clear the many possibilities for overcoming these cultural barriers," the university said in a press statement announcing the award.

Pamuk, 59, who hails from Istanbul, is widely-regarded as among Turkey's leading, contemporary writers, and a critical intellectual.

His writing reflects his belief in a Europe with fewer cultural boundaries, and as a more inclusive space that allows for the reconciliation of east and west, the university said.

Pamuk writes in Turkish, within the tradition of the western novel, on themes including Turkey's search for its own identity, and its movement towards being a modern, western-oriented society. The contradictions between the east and west, and the modern and the past, are recurring features in his work.

Some of his most influential fictional works include "The Black Book," "My Name is Red," and "Snow," for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006.

The Sonning Prize will be awarded to Pamuk on Oct. 26 in a ceremony at the University of Copenhagen.

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