Orhan Pamuk's Museum Catalogue wins Inaugural award in US

Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk on Saturday became the inaugural winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award in the United States, introduced this year by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the author's publicist announced on Tuesday. The award recognizes a book -- fiction or nonfiction -- that demonstrates the "highest literary merit as a creative or scholarly work on the theme of visual artists or art," according to the organizers. Categories include works of journalism, poetry, fiction, biography, history and museum exhibition catalogues. Pamuk won the award for "Innocence of Objects," his catalogue of his Istanbul-based museum, the Museum of Innocence, based on his bestselling novel of the same name that was published in 2008. Entirely based on a work of fiction, Pamuk's Museum of Innocence is the first of its kind around the world. Housed in a late-19th century apartment building in Beyoglu, the museum features hundreds of objects and ephemera related to the characters and events Pamuk recounts in his novel. In "Innocence of Objects," Pamuk writes about the psychology of the collector, the role of the museum, photographs of old Istanbul and the customs and traditions of the city. Pamuk was honored at a Saturday gala at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, at the Library of Virginia's annual Virginia Literary Awards. The Mary Lynn Kotz Award is named in honor of author and journalist Mary Lynn Kotz, a longtime contributing editor for ARTnews magazine, who has built a career interviewing, researching, writing and lecturing about art and artists. To be eligible, a piece of writing must have been published in the previous calendar year and in the United States.