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Thursday, October 13, 2005
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Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Harold Pinter, British Playwright Widely Studied in Academe
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The Swedish Academy announced this morning that the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to the British dramatist Harold Pinter, "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." The prize carries an award of approximately $1.3-million and will be formally presented in Stockholm on December 10.
"Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century," the academy said in a statement. "That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque.'"
Mr. Pinter's plays are widely taught in college literature courses, are the focus of a cottage industry of literary scholars, and are a staple of the campus theater repertoire.
The son of a Jewish dressmaker, Mr. Pinter was born in Hackney, a borough of London, in 1930, and was evacuated from the capital during World War II. His youthful experiences of anti-Semitism and war had a powerful effect on his development as a dramatist, the academy said. In 1948 he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; in 1951 he joined a repertory company known for its performances of Shakespeare. In 1957 he made his debut as a playwright with The Room, quickly followed by two of his best-known plays, The Birthday Party, which the academy described as "at first a fiasco of well-known proportions," and The Dumb Waiter.
His "conclusive breakthrough" came two years later, in 1959, with The Caretaker. Mr. Pinter's many other works include The Homecoming (1964), Landscape (1967), Silence (1968), No Man's Land (1974), One for the Road (1984), The New World Order (1991), and Ashes to Ashes (1996). He has also written poems and a number of screenplays, including adaptations of the novels The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Remains of the Day.
Writing in The Guardian, a British newspaper, in 2002, Michael Billington commented that "the screenplays not only constitute a significant second canon to the plays, but reveal an even more consistent preoccupation with politics."
The Swedish Academy, in its statement, focused on his contributions to the stage. "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," it noted. "Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theater, but has later more aptly been characterized as 'comedy of menace,' a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations."
The academy also praised Mr. Pinter's continuing analysis of "threat and injustice" and his work, since 1973, "as a fighter for human rights," taking "stands seen as controversial." For instance, he has emerged as one of the leading British voices against the American- and British-led invasion of Iraq. Mr. Pinter is married to the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Among the many critical studies devoted to Mr. Pinter's work are Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter, by Susan Hollis Merritt (Duke University Press, 1990); Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre, by D. Keith Peacock (Greenwood, 1997); The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Esthetic, by Penelope Prentice (Garland, 2000); Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, by Steven H. Gale (University Press of Kentucky, 2003); and The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, edited by Leslie Kane (Routledge, 2004). In 2001 Cambridge University Press published The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. The University of Tampa publishes The Pinter Review, a semiannual academic journal devoted entirely to the study of his work.
More information about the prize-winning author is available on the Nobel Web site.
Other news of the 2005 Nobel Prizes:
- Nobel Prize in Economics Goes to 2 Scholars Who Developed Game Theory as Analytical Tool in Public Policy (10/10/2005)
- Winner of 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Taught at NYU (10/7/2005)
- 3 Share Nobel Prize in Chemistry (10/5/2005)
- 2 Americans and a German Win Nobel Prize in Physics, for Research in Optics (10/4/2005)
- 2 Australians Win Nobel Prize in Medicine, for Research on Peptic Ulcers (10/3/2005)