Turkey’s most celebrated novelist goes on trial on December 16 on a charge that amounts to treason.

Orhan Pamuk, who is probably more feted abroad than in his native land, is accused of insulting Turkey in an interview earlier this year in which he attacked official indifference to the fate of Armenians, during the last days of the Ottoman empire, and of the Kurds during the civil conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. That conflict killed 35,000 people, including many Kurdish civilians in Turkey’s south-eastern provinces.