Other awards, or, sometimes it's not about the United States.
Award(s):
Evening Standard drama award, 1961,
Antoinette Perry ( "Tony") Award nomination for Best Play and
Newspaper Guild of New York award, both 1962, all for The Caretaker;
Italia Prize, 1963, for television play The Lover;
two Screenwriters Guild Awards, for television play and for screenplay, both 1963;
New York Film Critics Award, 1964, for The Servant;
British Film Academy Award, 1965 and 1971;
Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1966;
New York Drama Critics Circle Award,
Whitbread Anglo-American Theater Award, and
Antoinette Perry Award, all 1967, all for The Homecoming;
Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany), 1970;
Writers Guild Award, 1971;
Best New Play award, Plays & Players, 1971, and
Tony Award nomination, 1972, both for Old Times;
Austrian State Prize in Literature, 1973;
New York Drama Critics Circle Award, 1980;
Pirandello Prize, 1980;
Common Wealth Award, Bank of Delaware, 1981;
Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Arts and Letters, 1985;
David Cohen British Literature prize, 1995;
numerous honorary degrees from institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States, including
University of Reading, 1970,
University of Birmingham, 1971,
University of Glasgow, 1974,
University of East Anglia, 1974,
University of Stirling, 1979,
Brown University, 1982,
University of Hull, 1986,
University of Sussex, 1990,
University of East London, 1994, and
University of Sofia (Bulgaria), 1995;
honorary fellowship from Queen Mary College, 1987;
United Kingdom's Companion of Honor award, 2002, for services to literature;
Great Britain's Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, 2005, for his poems protesting the Iraq war.
"Harold Pinter, 1930-". Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005. POWER Library. Infotrac. Accessed 14 Oct 2005.
He has written 57 plays, screenplays and radio scripts, mostly solo. He has collaborated with a few people. Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, one presumes, would not collaborate with a no-talent schmoe.
He is also a poet of considerable accomplishment, who brings his poetic skills to his dialog, which is noted for its realistic depiction of common contemporary speech combined with poetic depth, including a strategic and deliberate use of silence. Theater-goers, critics and scholars either love his work or they hate it, so in that way he has helped to keep interest in theater alive.
Do you think that perhaps they decided to honor the old man based on his body of work?
As a side note, when I did an internet search using +pinter +"nobel prize" +"other candidates", because I had heard that other candidates were considered but neither had the necessary votes, I came up with pages of blogs. I read the entries for the first two pages, whose entries had to do with "other candidates" in reference to Ms. Miers, our Supreme Court nominee, and references to Pinter as a moonbat. Sometimes the entries were identical, textually, even though the blogs themselves were different. Might your sources have something to do with the reason you think that this is primarily about politics rather than literature?
It really truly isn't always about the US. We are not the center of the universe.
Btw, the other two writers said to have been in contention are Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist, and a Syrian poet who emigrated first to Lebanon and then to Paris after the civil war began, Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, who writes under the pen name "Adonis" (pronounced ah-doe-NEESS). Per npr.org.