[情報] nobel prize goes to Pinter
http://books.guardian.co.uk/nobelprize/story/0,14969,1591402,00.html
Nobel prize goes to Pinter
Swedish Academy confounds expectations by naming Harold Pinter as this year'
s laureate
Sarah Crown
Thursday October 13, 2005
This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely
unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their
decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British
playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely
anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.
The Academy, which has handed out the prize since 1901, described Pinter,
whose works include The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough
The Caretaker, as someone who restored the art form of theatre. In its
citation, the Academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost
representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century," and
declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under
everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."
Article continues
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's victory means that the prize has been given to a British writer for
the second time in under five years; it was awarded to VS Naipaul in 2001.
European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last 10 years so it was
widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from a different
continent.
The son of immigrant Jewish parents, Pinter was born in Hackney, London on
October 10, 1930. He himself has said that his youthful encounters with anti-
semitism led him to become a dramatist. Without doubt one of Britain's
greatest post-war playwrights, his long association with the theatre began
when he worked as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first
play, The Room, was performed at Bristol University in 1957; but it was in
1960 with his second full-length play, the absurdist masterpiece The
Caretaker, that his reputation was established. 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'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.
Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, said that Pinter was
overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words," he
said. "He was very happy."
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