Nobel prize goes to Pinter
Swedish Academy confounds expectations by naming Harold Pinter as
this year's laureate
Sarah Crown
Thursday October 13, 2005
This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely
unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their
decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British
playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely
anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.
The Academy, which has handed out the prize since 1901, described Pinter,
whose works include The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough
The Caretaker, as someone who restored the art form of theatre. In its
citation, the Academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost
representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century,"
and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice
under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."
Until today's announcement, Pinter was barely thought to be in the running
for the prize, one of the most prestigious and (at ?1.3m) lucrative in the
world. After Pamuk and Adonis (whose real name is Ali Ahmad Said), the
writers believed to be under consideration by the Academy included
Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, and the Swedish poet Thomas
Transtromer, with Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera and the South Korean poet
Ko Un as long-range possibilities. Following on from last year's
surprise decision to name the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet
Elfriede Jelinek as laureate, however, the secretive Academy has once
again confounded the bookies.
Pinter's victory means that the prize has been given to a British writer
for the second time in under five years; it was awarded to VS Naipaul in
2001. European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last 10 years
so it was widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from
a different continent.
The son of immigrant Jewish parents, Pinter was born in Hackney, London on
October 10, 1930. He himself has said that his youthful encounters with
anti-semitism led him to become a dramatist. Without doubt one of
Britain's greatest post-war playwrights, his long association with the
theatre began when he worked as an actor, under the stage name David
Baron. His first play, The Room, was performed at Bristol University
in 1957; but it was in 1960 with his second full-length play, the absurdist
masterpiece The Caretaker, that his reputation was established. Known for
their menacing pauses, his dark, claustrophobic plays are notorious for
their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal
lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lie beneath,
a feature of his writing which has garnered him the adjective "Pinteresque."
He has also written extensively for the cinema: his screenplays include The
Servant (1963), and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).
Pinter's authorial stance, always radical, has become more and more political
in recent years. An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called
President Bush a "mass murderer" and dubbed Tony Blair a "deluded idiot"),
in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK
for their decision to go to war (his collection, War, was awarded the Wilfred
Owen award for poetry). Earlier this year, he announced his decision to
retire from playwriting in favour of poetry, declaring on BBC Radio 4 that,
"I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems.
I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?"
In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and underwent a
course of chemotherapy, which he described as a "personal nightmare". "I've
been through the valley of the shadow of death," he said afterwards. "While
in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very
changed man." Earlier this week it was announced that he is to act in a
production of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the 50th
anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London's Royal
Court Theatre. Last weekend some of Britain and Ireland's finest actors
got together at Dublin's Gate Theatre to celebrate Pinter's 75th birthday,
which was on Monday.
Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, said that Pinter was
overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words,"
he said. "He was very happy."
http://books.guardian.co.uk/nobelprize/story/0,14969,1591402,00.html
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