LONDON, Dec 25: Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.

Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

“Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles,” the Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter’s award.

“With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution.”

The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce US President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than travelling to Stockholm.

“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?” he asked, in a hoarse voice.

Weakened by cancer and bandaged from a fall on a slippery pavement, Pinter seemed a vulnerable old man when he emerged from his London home to speak about the Nobel Award.

Though he had been looking forward to giving a Nobel lecture — “the longest speech I will ever have made” — he first cancelled plans to attend the awards, then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor’s advice.

Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, The Dwarfs, in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays, including The Quiller Memorandum (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1980). —AP