Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

Harold Pinter grew up in the East End of London, the son of a Jewish tailor, and spent his childhood understanding that what people say and what they mean are not reliably the same thing, and that the gap between them is where power lives.

His plays are built from that gap. A man is questioned in his room by two strangers. Tea is offered. Pleasantries are exchanged. The menace is peripheral at first, then central, then total — but it is never named. The most frightening thing in a Pinter play is rarely what is said. It is what the pause before the sentence contains.

He received the Nobel Prize in 2005. His acceptance speech — "Art, Truth and Politics" — is one of the most direct political statements ever made in a Nobel lecture. He said that political language is designed to hide reality, not describe it, and that the writer's task is to "find the truth" which is "elusive" and "often difficult to locate." He said this in a speech that was itself a model of how to locate it.

He was too ill to travel to Stockholm, so his Nobel Lecture (2005) was filmed in advance and shown on a screen. It is called "Art, Truth & Politics", and it turns from the theatre to the invasion of Iraq. Watch it, or read it, at NobelPrize.org.