The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
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Digest The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 standing ovation, embraced each has been passed over. Tomas member of the cast and it was clear that Tranströmer is a Swedish poet, translator he is held in enormous affection by his and professional psychologist, whose actors. work has been translated into 50 Making the announcement of the Nobel languages, most recently into Arabic. Prize, Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Ironically, Tranströmer has been criticised Secretary of the Swedish Academy, in Sweden for being insufficiently described Pinter as a writer ‘who in his political, but his writing has a painstaking plays uncovers the precipice under precision and a refusal to simplify that is everyday prattle and forces entry into the antithesis of the crude exercise of oppression’s closed rooms’. During power so ably explored by Pinter. recent years, Pinter has become Tranströmer’s problem is that the increasingly outspoken on political issues Swedish Academy is particularly drawing explicit attention to the abuse of sensitive to the accusation of having Photo: Martin Rosenbaum state power around the world, most awarded the Prize to relatively recently by the US and Britain in Iraq. A undeserving Swedish writers in the past. recent letter written to the Guardian However, he is a year younger than On 13 October 2005, the Swedish expressed the view that Pinter should Pinter. Perhaps in 2006 his undoubted Academy announced that the 2005 Nobel give up politics because his political stature will finally tell. I hope so. Prize in Literature was to be awarded to views had none of the depth and subtlety the English writer Harold Pinter. Pinter is of his plays. However, for me, the politics best known for his 29 plays, written arise inevitably from the plays. All his Iona Heath between 1957 and 2000, but he is also a plays are about the struggle for power, screen-writer, theatre director, actor, poet usually within close relationships and and political activist. Five days earlier, often inarticulate, and about the extent to enjoying a long weekend in Dublin, I had which the abuse of power is dependent had the good fortune to attend a reading, on the deliberate manipulation and by a particularly glittering cast, of Pinter’s perversion of memory and on the short play Celebration as part of the Gate systematic silencing of victims. Just the Theatre’s own celebration of Pinter’s 75th same issues pervade contemporary birthday. The play was funny and politics and he has both the courage and disturbing in equal measure, perfectly the integrity to make the connections. expressing the ‘comedy of menace’ that Yet, despite my admiration for Harold now defines the Pinteresque. Pinter Pinter, I must confess to regret that once himself was in the audience and, during a again another writer, also in his mid-70s, 980 British Journal of General Practice, December 2005.