Harold Pinter

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