LONDON.- The British Library has acquired a collection of over 100 unseen letters of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, revealing the desires and frustrations of the young aspiring writer during his formative years.

Written to his childhood friends Henry Woolf and Mick Goldstein in Hackney when Pinter was aged 18-30, the letters candidly discuss his early play-writing, including the development of what later became one of his most famous works, The Birthday Party, his annoyance at having to act when he was absorbed in writing (‘Playwriting just now has got me by the balls’), and his interest in a new unknown writer who was beginning to get attention at the time, Samuel Beckett.

Lady Antonia Fraser, widow of Harold Pinter said: “I am tremendously excited by these letters. It was fascinating to read what the young Harold wrote.”

Henry Woolf, Harold’s friend, commented: “For over sixty years Harold Pinter sent me letters bursting with energy and passionate concern, crammed with laughter too when he felt larky. I am so glad the British Library keeps them now for all the world to see.”

The letters are from a relatively undocumented period of Pinter’s life and have been acquired from Henry Woolf and Mick Goldstein, part of the close-knit ‘Hackney gang’ Pinter remained lifelong friends with. They form an important addition to the Library’s existing Harold Pinter archive, acquired in 2007, and join the Library’s unparalleled collections of contemporary British writers, including the personal archives of Hanif Kureishi, JG Ballard, Wendy Cope, Ted Hughes and Graham Swift.

The new material is available to researchers via the Library’s Reading Rooms from today. One of the letters from the new collection will also be on public display in the Library’s permanent exhibition space, the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery, from 1 December onwards.