Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Literature Prize

Leading 20th century British playwright Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Literature Prize the Swedish Academy announced.

The versatile Pinter is renowned for his exploration of domination and submission, threat and injustice in his over 30 plays, and his increasingly vocal political activism.

The laureate "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms", the jury said.

Pinter, who began his career as an actor, 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 said.

"In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion of their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence," the jury said.

Another theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.

He is even credited with an adjective, painteresque, 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 experience of wartime bombing also never lost its hold on him, the jury noted.

Pinter 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 rejoider to a request for illumination.

Pinter increasingly became involved in politics. He was outraged by the us-backed coup against the Salvador Allende government in Chile in 1973, and was a vocal critic of the late US President Ronald Reagan and Britain’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

More recently, he opposed the US-led war in Iraq and the preceding sanctions, protested against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey, railed against the bombing of Kosovo and has spoken out against torture.

Pinter is the 10th Briton to take home the prize, V S Naipaul in 2001 being the most recent of his countrymen to take the award.

Pinter, who was seen as a possibility for this year’s prize but not a favorite, will take home 1.3 million US dollars.

Last year, the honor went to controversial Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek.

Harold Pinter is the most influential British playwright of his generation, a writer whose sparse signature style spawned its own adjective: Pinteresque.

He`s also a man of firm political views, an unrelenting critic of the United States and its war in Iraq -- and of the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Leaning on a cane and sporting a bandaged head after a fall, Pinter today told reporters outside his London home that he felt "quite overwhelmed" by the award.

"I have no idea why they gave me the award," Pinter said. "I respect their judgment. I am very grateful."

Born the son of a Jewish tailor in the rough-and-tumble hackney district of east London in 1930, Pinter was a rebel from an early age, declaring himself a conscientious objector and refusing to do the then-compulsory military service.

He began his acting career in provincial theatres, and burst to -- attention as a writer with `The Birthday Party` (1957), in which the intruders Goldberg and Mccann enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."

The play established Pinter`s dark, distinctive style, which relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield. His characters` internal fears and longings, their guilt and unruly sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed.

Usually enclosed in one room, characters organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words. Gradually, the layers are peeled back to reveal the characters’ nakedness. The protection promised by the room usually disappears and the language disintegrates.