Pinter papers stay in Britain after million-pound sale

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2007

LONDON (AFP) — Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has sold his letters, manuscripts and emails to Britain's national library for 1.1 million pounds (1.5 million euros, 2.2 million dollars), it said Wednesday.

His 150-box archive includes letters he exchanged with fellow writers Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Arthur Miller and John Osborne plus an unpublished memoir about his youth entitled "The Queen Of All The Fairies".

The sale to the British Library in London, part-funded by a government grant, stops Pinter's papers from going abroad, as those of literary giants including Ted Hughes and Graham Greene have done.

Jamie Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, said it was "thrilling" to acquire the papers of "our...