Harold Pinter

Michael Billington

Feb 2009 · Faber & Faber

About this ebook

Michael Billington's engrossing biography examines Pinter's work in the context of his life. Through extended conversations with Pinter and interviews with his friends and colleagues, Billington creates a portrait of the man as well as the artist, from Pinter's Hackney childhood to his Nobel Prize, discussing his writing for stage and screen, as well as his fiction and poetry, his acting and directing, his political activity, his friendships, his two marriages and his passion for cricket. He emerges as a man of infinite complexity whose imaginative world is shaped by his private character.

This new edition includes a full transcript of the Nobel lecture, as well as an additional chapter written in the aftermath of Harold Pinter's death in December 2008.

'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.'
The Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

'Enthralling... An open-sesame into Pinter's work... A valuable book. And absorbing: I found it virtually unputdownable.' Financial Times

'No reader of this book will doubt that its subject is a man of the highest artistic stature.' Sunday Telegraph

About the author

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. He married Antonia Fraser in 1980. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005 he received the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, the Franz Kafka Award (Prague) and the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize, and in 2007 the highest French honour, the Légion d'honneur. He died in December 2008.

Michael Billington has been the Guardian theatre critic since 1971. He is a regular broadcaster on radio and television arts programmes. His previous books are on Peggy Ashcroft, Ken Dodd, Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Stoppard. He has also published a collection of theatre criticism, One Night Stands, and he edited Directors on 'Twelfth Night'. He is a Visiting Professor at King's College London and an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.