British playwright wins Nobel literature laurels
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-13 20:40

In 2003, Pinter published a volume of anti-war poetry about the Iraq conflict, and in 2004 he joined a group of celebrity campaigners calling for Blair to be impeached.

"I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand," he said.

Pinter has also written screenplays, including "The French Lieutenant's Woman" in 1981 from the John Fowles novel, as well as "The Accident," "The Servant" and "The Go-Between."

Pinter is the first Briton to win the literature award since V.S. Naipaul won it in 2001.

The son of a Jewish dressmaker, Pinter was born in London on Oct. 10, 1930. Pinter has said his encounters with anti-Semitism in his youth influenced him in becoming a dramatist. The wartime bombing of London also affected him deeply, the academy said.

The academy's announcement came on Yom Kippur, Judaism's most important holiday.

Most prolific between 1957 and 1965, Pinter relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield.

His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed in order to try to survive.