HOWZAT

Pinter will profit from the 10 million kronor (£730,000) prize and increased book sales. But by giving the award to such an overtly political figure, the academy will also continue controversy over the prize.

One jury member, Knut Ahnlund, resigned this week after writing in a newspaper that last year’s selection of the Austrian feminist Elfriede Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the award’s reputation.

There were suspicions, however, that his decision to stand down two days ago was sealed by a rift among judges over whether to honour Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish dissident writer, with the prize.

The debate was very much in keeping with disputes that have often erupted around the quirky and politically correct choices of the academy, whose 18 members are appointed for life.

Mr Ahnlund's withdrawal reduced the active membership to 15. Two other members, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, left in 1989 in protest at the academy's failure to express support for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the late Iranian leader.

Pinter is due to take part in the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre in London, despite recently recovering from radiation treatment for cancer of the oesophagus. He will star in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

The playwright joins an illustrious list of British winners which includes V.S. Naipul (2001), William Golding (1983), Sir Winston Churchill (1953), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Rudyard Kipling (1907).

Pinter has always been vocal in his defence of human rights. He was outraged by the US-backed coup against the Salvador Allende government in Chile in 1973, and was a critic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

More recently, he opposed the US-led war in Iraq and the preceding sanctions, protested against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey, railed against the bombing of Kosovo and has spoken out against torture.

In a 2003 poem God Bless America, Pinter wrote: "Here they go again, The Yanks in their armoured parade, Chanting their ballads of joy, As they gallop across the big world, Praising America’s God."

He turned down an offer of a knighthood from John Major and has since raged against Tony Blair, calling the Prime Minister a "deluded idiot" and has referred to President Bush as a "mass murderer."

This afternoon he added: "I think the world is going down the drain if we’re not very careful. It’s a very dangerous world as we all know, and I don’t think this country is helping at all. Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of the Western democracies to the rest of the world and how they choose to exert their own power."

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