Original posted at DailyKos.
Straight from the Beeb and the Guardian:
Controversial British playwright and campaigner Harold Pinter has won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature.
Pinter, 75, whose plays include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, was announced as the winner of the $1.3m (£723,000) cash prize on Thursday.
The Nobel academy said Pinter’s work “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.
The playwright is known for speaking out on issues like the war on Iraq.
Well, whaddaya know about dat…?
As a writer, I admit: it is hard to understand Pinter’s work. He also doesn’t explain it. I saw one of his plays while in college in the Seventies. The silences were killing. I figure now, that was probably the point.
Known for their menacing pauses, his dark, claustrophobic plays are notorious for their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lie beneath, a feature of his writing which has garnered him the adjective “Pinteresque.” He has also written extensively for the cinema: his screenplays include The Servant (1963), and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981).
Pinter, widely regarded as the UK’s greatest living playwright, is well-known for his left-wing political views.
A critic of US and UK foreign policy, he has voiced opposition on a number of issues including the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001.
One more slap for Bush and Blair. The Guardian went on to say:
Pinter’s authorial stance, always radical, has become more and more political in recent years. An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called President Bush a “mass murderer” and dubbed Tony Blair a “deluded idiot”), in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK for their decision to go to war (his collection, War, was awarded the Wilfred Owen award for poetry). Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry, declaring on BBC Radio 4 that. “I think I’ve stopped writing plays now, but I haven’t stopped writing poems. I’ve written 29 plays. Isn’t that enough?”
In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and underwent a course of chemotherapy, which he described as a “personal nightmare”. “I’ve been through the valley of the shadow of death,” he said afterwards. “While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I’m also a very changed man.” Earlier this week it was announced that he is to act in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Last weekend some of Britain and Ireland’s finest actors got together at Dublin’s Gate Theatre to celebrate Pinter’s 75th birthday, which was on Monday.
He can leave this world tomorrow in style if it was his time.
Pinter, married to Lady Antonia Fraser (biographer of Mary Queen of Scots; her mother, the Countess of Longford, wrote a much lauded biography of Queen Victoria), was not even considered a front runner. Still waters run deep…
Until today’s 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 has also acted in film. I saw him in a 1999 version of Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park, directed by Patricia Rozema, in which the landed family’s holdings of slaves and property in Antigua are given much greater focus and serve to give Austin’s dark commentary about manners, marriage and morals greater urgency. His character, Sir Thomas Bertram, is shown as joining in the brutality of the slavocracy that bolstered his and the British nobility’s fortunes until it was abolished in the 1830s, long after Austin died.
I was impressed by his performance, although his character was not a good guy. And really, he is a handsome, distinguished individual. I can see why he was considered a ladykiller when younger. And I can respect brilliance and courage and conviction when I see it, too.
Good show.
