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 he 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?

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.

VIDEO CLIPS Exclusive interviews with Michael Billington and Karel Reisz talking about Harold Pinter
		The golden period     Michael Billington on Harold Pinter's youth. Was it as golden as recollections seem to suggest?
		The link between Beckham and Pinter     Billington discusses David Beckham and Pinter, and the media's expectations
		Interpretation of Pinter's works     "Part of the pleasure of watching a Pinter play is not fully understanding what it is about" - Michael Billington
		No Man's Land     Billington on the inspiration for No Man's Land and Pinter's witty response to biographical comparisons
		Writing     Billington discusses the process of writing as a "journey into the unknown"
		Karel Reisz on Pinter     "He's not at all a literary person who looks down on movies... he's someone for whom movies matter"
		Theatre production vs moviemaking     Karel Reisz discusses the difference between working on a theatre production and a movie

Trackback: http://tb.donews.net/TrackBack.aspx?PostId=589675