Harold Pinter

'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.'

The Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2005.

Michael Billington's engrossing biography takes Harold Pinter from his Hackney childhood to his current eminence. This new edition includes a full transcript of the Nobel lecture, as well as an additional chapter and accompanying photographs covering the years 1996-2006.

During the past decade, Pinter has written a new play, three film scripts, sheaves of poems, several sketches and created, with composer James Clarke, a pioneering work for radio, Voices . He has acted on stage, screen and radio, he has appeared on countless political platforms, and his work has been extensively celebrated in festivals at Dublin's Gate Theatre and New York's Lincoln Center. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2006, the European Theatre Prize. He has faced illness with stoic resilience and his spirit remains as fiercely combative as ever despite having twice come close to death. As he wrote in 2005 to Professor Avraham Oz, one of Israel's leading internal opponents of authoritarianism: 'Let's keep fighting'.