HE HAS been showered with awards and is revered worldwide, but Harold Pinter, one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, received the ultimate accolade yesterday — the $1.3 million (£743,000) Nobel Prize for Literature.

At the age of 75, he is following in the footsteps of Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw, among winners of the world’s most prestigious literary honour.

Pinter, who broke the mould of British theatre in the 1960s, turned silence into an artform with brooding dramas.

His classics for screen and stage, including The Caretaker, The Homecoming and The Servant, have stood the test of time, influencing a generation of British dramatists and introduced a new word to the English language, Pinteresque, to convey an atmospheric silence.

This month the Swedish Academy decision to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei was seen as a slap in the face for the US.

Now it has awarded the Literature Prize to a radical and unrelenting critic of America and its war in Iraq and of the Government of Tony Blair. Pinter, who has never been afraid to speak his mind on the political stage, has denounced the Prime Minister as “a hired Christian thug” and President Bush as a “mass murderer”.

Pinter said yesterday that he was “overwhelmed” and, speaking to reporters outside his London home, took the opportunity to attack the Government over the Iraq war. “I have written 29 plays and I think that’s really enough,” he said after a champagne celebration with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser at their home. “I think the world has had enough of my plays. I shall certainly be writing more poetry and I’ll certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political structures in this world.” The writer has been recovering from cancer of the oesophagus.

Leaning on a cane outside and sporting a bandaged head after a fall, he continued: “I think the world is going down the drain if we’re not very careful,” he said. “Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of Western democracies to the rest of the world.” He also hinted that he would use the 45-minute acceptance speech to attack the war in Iraq. “I intend to say whatever it is I think. I may well address the state of the world.”

The academy said that it had singled out Pinter, “who, in his plays, uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

Once again, the academy has opened the debate on the political nature of a prize for literature. This year’s announcement was delayed for a week after the 15 active academy members were reported to have disagreed over whether to anoint Orhan Pamuk, the Turk who has campaigned for recognition that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians after the First World War. A prize for him would have angered Turkey, it was feared.

Part of the problem lies with the prize founder himself. Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896, decreed in his will that the literature prize should go to “the person who shall have produced . . . the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, a phrase that has confounded everyone since.

News of Pinter’s win sent a flurry of excitement through the British publishing and theatre worlds, if not Downing Street or the White House. There was also a sense of relief that they knew his work. Year after year, there has been a Pinteresque pause from publishers before they ask, “Who?”, and confess to never having heard of the winner.

Some of Britain’s leading playwrights were among those leading the applause yesterday.

The Oscar-winning writer Sir Tom Stoppard said: “With his earliest work he stood alone in British theatre up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too.”

Sir David Hare, whose dramas include Stuff Happens, about the Iraq war, said the academy had made a brilliant choice: “Not only has Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension.”

Pinter also follows in the footsteps of Sir V. S. Naipaul who, in 2001, became the first British author to win the prize since William Golding in 1983.

Born the son of a Jewish tailor in East London in 1930, Pinter was a rebel from an early age, declaring himself a conscientious objector and refusing to do national service. He began his acting career in provincial theatres. The Caretaker established him as a commercial and critical success, making him one of Britain’s foremost dramatists.

LOUD APPLAUSE

“He had incredible tenacity as a director, expressed perhaps best through his profound irritation at the old Royal Court’s squeaky chairs, which blighted many a performance.”

Stephen Daldry, former artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre

“He’s very pedantic, famously so. Words don’t get changed, lines don’t get changed. He really believes in the text.”

James Fox, who starred in Pinter’s classic, The Servant

“My two favourites are Landscape and Silence. I just thought, and still do, they are the most beautiful poetic dramas, full of the pain of lost memory.”

Ian Brown, artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse

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