Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was one of the most influential modern British playwrights and screenwriters, who was active for more than five decades. Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, east London, to lower middle class parents Jack Pinter and Frances, maiden name Moskowitz. He started writing poetry at age 12, and five years later became a published author for the first time ever, in Hackney Downs School Magazine, and then in Poetry London, in 1950. Pinter was a multitalented artist who excelled as an actor and director, but he will always be remembered for his writing, and for his sense of drama.

His plays, including Ashes to Ashes, The Basement, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Celebration, The Collection, The Dumb Waiter, The Dwarfs, Family Voices, The Homecoming, The Hothouse, A Kind of Alaska, Landscape, The Lover, Moonlight, Monologue, Mountain Language, A Night Out, Night School, No Man's Land, Old Times, One for the Road, Party Time, Remembrance of Things Past, The Room, Silence, A Slight Ache, Tea Party, Victoria Station, and Voices, are broadly classified as comedies of menaces, and as memory plays. In addition, Pinter adapted both his own work and that of others for the big screen.

During his lifetime, Harold Pinter became the recipient of multiple accolades, such as the Order of the British Empire, the Shakespeare Prize, the European Prize for Literature, the Pirandello Prize, the Chilean Order of Merit, The David Cohen Prize, the honorary fellowship of Queen Mary, the Laurence Olivier Special Award, the Molière d'honneur, the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, the BAFTA Fellowship, the Companion of Literature, The Critics' Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, the Brianza Poetry Prize, the South Bank Show Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, the ST Dupont Golden Pen Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature, the Premio Fiesole ai Maestri del Cinema, the World Leaders Award, the Hermann Kesten Medallion for outstanding commitment on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers, the Companion of Honour for services to Literature, the Diploma ad Honorem Teatro Filodrammatici, the Evening Standard Awards, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Europe Theatre Prize, the Serbian Foundation Prize, the St. George Plaque of the City of Kragujevac, and the Legion d'honneur. Pinter died in 2008.