Pinter wins Nobel Prize

The Swedish Academy awarded this year’s Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and poet, Harold Pinter October 2005.

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 the 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 V. S. Naipaul in 2001. European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last ten years so it was widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from a different continent.

See The Guardian for an interview with Harold Pinter.

For more information about Harold Pinter see his entry on Contemporary Writers.