News & Reviews

WORD: And the winner is... Harold Pinter takes Nobel Prize

Closing out a week of big time literary honors, on Thursday playwright Harold Pinter of England won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, widely viewed as the world’s most prestigious decoration for authors. In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms" in his plays.

Pinter joins literary giants such as South Africa’s J.M Coetzee, Americans Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway, Spain’s Camilio Jose Cela (whose novel The Family of Pascual Duarte is amazing) and Frenchman Jean Paul Sartre, who declined the award, as Nobel Prize laureates.

While the Nobel is often viewed as denoting "the world’s greatest author" status, the academy strongly favors authors who write politically oriented work. Pinter is probably best known for his play The Caretaker in 1959, but in recent decades has been a vocal critic of British government as well as the war in Iraq.

Publisher Grove/Atlantic, which printed a small 6,000 copy run of his political writings Death Etc., announced shortly after Pinter’s Nobel Prize that it would print another 25,000 copies of the book.

Meanwhile the Nobel’s $1.3 million prize and the inevitable boost in book sales should provide a lavish lifestyle for Pinter, who announced his retirement earlier this year.

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