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Harold Pinter, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest British playwrights of his generation, has died.

The Nobel Prize winner lost his battle with cancer on Christmas Eve, his agent confirmed. He was 78.

Pinter, who also enjoyed success as a screenwriter for film and television, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, being hailed by the awarding committee as "the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".

However he was too frail to travel to the ceremony, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2002.

Pinter was due to pick up an honorary degree earlier this month from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, but forced to withdraw from the event due to illness.

Lady Antonia Fraser, his second wife, said: “He was a great man, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years.”

Pinter was best known for his plays, including The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and The Homecoming, but he was also a director, actor and screen-writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

The Nobel academy described him as “generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century”.

Pinter, who was born in Hackney, East London, was given a diagnosis of cancer of the oesophagus in 2002, but later said that he was recovering from the illness. In the later years of his life he gave up writing plays to become a political activist and vocal critic of the Iraq war, which he said constituted a “bandit act”.

He died at Hammersmith Hospital, West London, soon after being admitted on Wednesday. He will have a small, private funeral, followed by a public memorial service, to be held on a date to be confirmed.

Born in Hackney, East London, the son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter threw himself into acting from an early age.

In the mid-1950s he began to write for the stage and The Room was published in 1957. A year later his first full length play, The Birthday Party, was produced in the West End but closed after just one week to disastrous reviews.

It was his second full-length play, The Caretaker, with which Pinter secured his reputation as one of the country’s foremost dramatists and playwrights.

He has long been known as politically minded, having refused to do national service in 1948 and turned down John Major’s offer of a knighthood

Most recently he had campaigned against the occupation of Iraq, being awarded the Wilfred Owen award for poetry in 2004, for a collection of work criticising the war.

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