Pinter wins Nobel prize

BRITISH playwright Harold Pinter, a master of sparse dialogue and menacing silences who has been an outspoken critic of the US-led war in Iraq, was the surprise winner of the Nobel literature prize yesterday.

Mr Pinter said he was “overwhelmed,” and then promptly announced he was giving up playwrighting.

“I have written 29 plays and I think that’s really enough,” said Pinter after a champagne celebration with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser at their London home.

“I think the world has had enough of my plays. I shall certainly be writing more poetry and I’ll certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political structures in this world.”

The 75-year-old Londoner, son of a Jewish dressmaker, is one of Britain’s best-known dramatists for plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, whose mundane dialogue with sinister undercurrents gave rise to the adjective Pinteresque.

The Swedish Academy said Mr Pinter was an author “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

Mr Pinter’s influence has been felt throughout British literature and across the ocean in the work of American playwrights Sam Shepard and David Mamet.

An intimidating presence with bushy eyebrows and a rich voice, he was described by Swedish Academy head Horace Engdahl, who announced the prize, as “the towering figure” in English drama in the second half of the 20th century.

Critics called him an unexpected but deserving choice for the €1 million prize - the second Nobel this month with an anti-US flavour, after the Peace Prize for the UN nuclear watchdog which is criticised by Washington.

An active human rights campaigner, Pinter has likened US President George W Bush’s administration to the Nazis and called British Prime Minister Tony Blair a “mass murderer” for invading Iraq.

The world of theatre hailed the new Nobel laureate.

“It’s wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years,” said Tom Stoppard, another of Britain’s greatest post-war dramatists.

“This is a writer of the highest integrity. I think the Nobel committee got it right,” Michael Colgan, director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin which is currently staging a celebration of Pinter plays and readings, said.

Mr Pinter has gained a reputation as an actor, director and screenwriter, with film credits like The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

He has said his encounters with anti-Semitism in his youth influenced him in becoming a dramatist. The wartime bombing of London also affected him deeply, the academy said.