2005 Nobel Prize for Literature

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Harold Pinter

has been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honour available to any writer in the world. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Pinter will travel to Stockholm in December to accept the award. More coming soon......

In 1958 I wrote the following: "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?


Harold Pinter has been awarded the Wilfred Owen prize for poetry opposing the Iraq Conflict.

Along a similar theme he recently took part in a debate at the Imperial War Museum for 'Authors Take Sides On Iraq' and his latest piece of poetry The ‘Special Relationship' has been published in The Guardian.

Born 10 October 1930 in East London, playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist.

Pinter has written twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room at The Almeida Theatre, London in the spring of 2000.

He has been awarded the Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg), the European Prize for Literature (Vienna), the Pirandello Prize (Palermo), the David Cohen British Literature Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He has received honorary degrees from fourteen universities.


Pinter's interest in politics is a very public one. Over the years he has spoken out forcefully about the abuse of state power around the world, including, recently, NATO's bombing of Serbia. His most recent speech was given on the anniversary of NATO'S bombing of Serbia at the Committee for Peace in the Balkans Conference, at The Conway Hall June 10th 2000.

Works

Plays

The Room (1957)
The Birthday Party (1957)
The Dumb Waiter (1957)
A Slight Ache (1958)
The Hothouse (1958)
The Caretaker (1959)
A Night Out (1959)
Night School (1960)
The Dwarfs (1960)
The Collection (1961)
The Lover (1962)
Tea Party (1964)
The Homecoming (1964)
The Basement (1966)
Landscape (1967)
Silence (1968)
Old Times (1970)
Monologue (1972)
No Man's Land (1974)
Betrayal (1978)
Family Voices (1980)
Other Places (1982)
A Kind of Alaska (1982)
Victoria Station (1982)
One For The Road (1984)
Mountain Language (1988)
The New World Order (1991)
Party Time (1991)
Moonlight (1993)
Ashes to Ashes (1996)
Celebration (1999)
Remembrance of Things Past (2000)

Sketches

The Black and White (1959)
Trouble in the Works (1959)
Last to Go (1959)
Request Stop (1959)
Special Offer (1959)
That's Your Trouble (1959)
That's All (1959)
Interview (1959
Applicant (1959)
Dialogue Three (1959)
Night (1969)
Precisely (1983)
Press Conference (2002)

Radio

Voices (2005)


Films

The Caretaker (1963)
The Servant (1963)
The Pumpkin Eater (1963)
The Quiller Memorandum (1965)
Accident (1966)
The Birthday Party (1967)
The Go-Between (1969)
The Homecoming (1969)
Langrishe Go Down (1970) (adapted for TV 1978)
The Proust Screenplay (1972)
The Last Tycoon (1974)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980)
Betrayal (1981)
Victory (1982)
Turtle Diary (1984)
The Handmaid's Tale (1987)
Reunion (1988)
Heat of the Day (1988)
Comfort of Strangers (1989)
The Trial (1989)
The Dreaming Child (1997)
The Tragedy of King Lear (2000)

Prose

Kullus (1949)
The Dwarfs (1952-56)
Latest Reports from the Stock Exchange (1953)
The Black and White (1954-55)
The Examination (1955)
Tea Party (1963)
The Coast (1975)
Problem (1976)
Lola (1977)
Short Story (1995)
Girls (1995)
Sorry About This (1999)
God's District (1997)
Tess (2000)
Voices in the Tunnel (2001)
[edit]
Poetry
Poems (1971)
I Know the Place (1977)
Poems and Prose 1949-1977 (1978)
Ten Early Poems (1990)
100 Poems by 100 Poets (1992)
Collected Poems and Prose (1995)
"The Disappeared" and Other Poems (2002)
War (2003)"