In the citation for the award, which was announced yesterday, the Swedish Academy noted that Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".

But Pinter - after a champagne celebration with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser at their London home - said: "I have written 29 plays and I think that's really enough. I think the world has had enough of my plays. I shall certainly be writing more poetry and I'll certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political structures in this world."

Leaning on a cane and sporting a bandaged head and bruised eye after a fall, he admitted feeling very grateful and "quite overwhelmed".

The very fact that his name had entered the English language as an adjective - Pinteresque - was, the Academy added, proof that his plays were "modern classics".

"Pinteresque" is also shorthand for the way the man himself is often described: enigmatic, terse, explosive and forbidding.

Earlier this year in an interview Pinter acknowledged that he was "a bit of a pain in the arse".

To George Bush and Tony Blair - who should, he has argued, be arraigned as war criminals over Iraq - that might seem a fair assessment. But even those who disagree with him have to concede that Pinter's political engagement is not only sustained and wide-ranging but also underlies much of his best work.

He has always avoided analysing plays that made his name - starting with his first full-length work, The Birthday Party, in 1957 and continuing right up to Voices, his collaboration with the composer James Clarke, which was broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday. A play only means what it means, and doesn't need spelling out, he says. "If you want the audience to love you, you're finished."

The Academy's citation noted many critics drew a distinction between the psychological realism of Pinter's early works, the lyricism of his middle-period such as Landscape (1967) and the more political flavour of later plays.

But it then dismissed this "over-simplification", arguing his work had a remarkable continuity, especially in its analysis of menace and injustice.

There are some clues about where all that came from in Pinter's background. He was born in 1930, the only son of Jewish immigrants who ran a tailor's shop in London's East End, from which he was evacuated three times, each time returning only to witness the Blitz and V1 and V2 raids.

"The condition of being bombed has never left me," he noted. Growing up Jewish at a time when fascism was on the march might similarly have left its mark in the way his plays address power and powerlessness.

As a teenager he had discovered writers such as Kafka and Hemingway, and won a place to study acting at RADA. Two years later, he dropped out, and in an early example of principled intransigence, was fined at a magistrates court in 1949 for refusing to complete his National Service.

In 1956, he married the actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. He left her in the mid-1970s, in a blizzard of headlines, to live with Lady Antonia Fraser. A TV profile three years ago retraced the cramped flats and bedsits of the early years of his first marriage and found hitherto unsuspected links with some of the more unsettling characters of his emotionally claustrophobic early plays.

Although The Birthday Party later became regarded as a classic, it played to sparse audiences when it was first staged and closed in its first week.

In 1959, however, The Caretaker established his reputation as the coming man of theatre. It also introduced audiences to Pinter's trademark verbal violence and menacing silences - hence the Bennett tribute.

His success continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s with The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land and Betrayal. Overshadowed by his work on the stage, he also had a lucrative and important career as a screenwriter, writing 24 scripts of which no fewer than 17 have been filmed as written. Among them are The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Although he seldom spoke about his own feelings, his appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival three years ago was a remarkable exception. It was his first public appearance since undergoing an operation for cancer of the oesophagus.

That afternoon, he spoke with moving candour about facing up to death, about love, friendship and even why he likes cricket.

His voice may have been weakened by his battle with cancer, but it remained loud enough, then and now, for all the world to hear.