Leading British playwright Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced.
Pinter, ”who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”, is the foremost representative of drama in post-war Britain, the jury said.
The laureate ”restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles”, it added.
He is even credited with an adjective, ”Pinteresque”, which is used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama.
Pinter, who has just turned 75, was born in the London borough of Hackney, the son of a Jewish dressmaker. During his youth he experienced anti-Semitism, which he said had been important in his decision to become a dramatist.
The author of more than 30 plays, Pinter also wrote poetry, prose and screen adaptations and has occasionally directed for the stage as well as acting in films and plays.
He made his playwriting debut in 1957, with The Room. His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker in 1959, followed by The Homecoming in 1964.
Enigmatic but coherent, Pinter was notoriously reluctant to explain the inner workings of his plays even to his actors.
”Mind your own business. Just say the words,” was a typical rejoinder to a request for illumination.
Pinter has maintained a wary distance from the establishment, turning down the offer of a knighthood (unlike Tom Stoppard or fellow firebrand David Hare), but was mainstream enough in his appeal to figure in the National Portrait Gallery. His passions include that most traditionalist of sports, cricket.
He is estranged from the son from his first marriage, Daniel, a talented writer and musician who became a recluse after suffering a breakdown. He rarely speaks about his personal relationships, and refuses to acknowledge any link between his life and his art.
He made clear early on his attitude to requests for explanations of his work: ”Everything to do with the play is in the play,” he wrote in 1958. And, paradoxically for such an accomplished wielder of words, his attitude to language itself was distinctly ambivalent.
On the characters he created for the stage, he wrote: ”It is in the silence that they are most evident to me.”
Pinter will take home the prize sum of 10-million kronor ($1,3-million). His name had been mentioned among the possible winners of this year’s prize.
Last year, the honour went to Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek.
Pinter will receive the Nobel Prize, which consists of the prize money, a gold medal and a diploma, from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel prizes, in 1896.
The literature prize was the last of the six coveted awards to be handed out this month.
Last week, the Nobel Medicine Prize went to Australian research duo Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for their breakthrough research on how to treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics.
The physics prize went to Theodor W Haensch of Germany and United States nationals Roy Glauber and John Hall for groundbreaking work on understanding light, while the chemistry prize honoured Yves Chauvin of France and US nationals Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock for a breakthrough in carbon chemistry that opens the way to smarter drugs and environmentally friendlier plastics.
The economics prize was awarded to Robert Aumann, an Israeli-US citizen, and Thomas Schelling of the US for using game theory to explain conflict resolution.
Finally, the peace prize, perhaps the most prestigious of the awards, went to the United Nations’s International Atomic Energy Agency and its Egyptian director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, for their efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. — AFP
