Uncategorized | October 17, 2005

British playwright Harold Pinter has been awarded the 75th annual Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known as the author of The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and The Birthday Party, Pinter will receive the $1.3 million prize and joins a long list of distinguished authors including William Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jean-Paul Satre, who declined the award in 1964.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy calls Pinter a dramatist “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” Further, “Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles.”

Pinter has been a vocal critic of the Bush and Blair administrations, and, in his own words, will “certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political structures in this world.”