The week gone by was eagerly watched by book lovers and critics alike.
And while the world has come to expect surprises at the best literary awards, what happened last week could well be called a coup of sorts.
 Let's begin with the Man Booker award.
The front-runners here were British author Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro.
But the scales tipped in favour of the Irish stylist John Banville.
His novel 'The Sea' took the £50,000 prize shocking not just the bookies but the literary insiders who had almost shrugged it as a castaway.
Reports indicate what swung things his way was the casting vote of none other than Professor John Sutherland, the Chairman of the Man Booker Committee.
Up until then the judges were tied, with two backing Banville and two, it is understood, supporting the runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'.
While Banville has been hailed as "the writer's writer" nobody really expected his 14th novel to come so far.
It tells the story of a middle-aged man who returns to a seaside town from his childhood and tries to reconstruct events of a distant summer.
Judges called his work a "masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected,” one which deserved this year's prestigious literary award.
 Just as the world was coming to grips with this one, there was yet another surprise, this time it was the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Everyone had their hot favourites and there had been talk of something special happening here.
Though few were prepared for the announcement of Harold Pinter - even Pinter himself - who is said to have had a rather famous fall, after hearing the news.
Earlier, as the guessing game was continuing, the list of possible winners that was unraveled featured many of the usual suspects.
These included American novelists Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, Ismael Kadare of Albania, Israeli Amos Oz, Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Adonis.
Some Nobel watchers had hinted that the jury could choose to broaden the scope of the award this year and honour a non-fiction author.
And if the jury had swung that way topping the charts was Polish literary journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski followed by Belarussian Svetlana Alexievich.
Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera and South Korean poet Ko Un were considered the outsiders.
But nowhere did the lists making the rounds have a P on them.
So when the announcement was made it clearly showed that the Nobel Literature Prize had well and truly arrived with a new twist.
 Confounding the bookies, the Swedish Academy which has handed the prize since 1901 said Pinter 'restored the art form of theatre'.
It added the playwright and poet 'uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.'
A reference of sorts, one reckons, to Pinter's strong opposition to the US-led war in Iraq.
It was in 2003 that he turned to poetry to castigate the British and American leaders for their decision to go to war.
His collection of poems simply titled 'War' went on to win the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry. Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry.
 Despite his decision his plays which include 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', 'The Dumb Waiter' and his breakthrough 'The Caretaker' will be played and re-played for audiences globally.
And the key attraction of these will remain the menacing pauses.
His dark plays are best-known for their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lies beneath.
That's a feature of his writing which garnered him the adjective "Pinteresque."
And it is isn’t just poetry and plays that have dominated Pinter’s life, he has also doubled up as an actor and has also written extensively for the cinema.
His best-known screenplays include The Servant (1963) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).
You can read more about his work on his fabulously documented website: www.haroldpinter.org
If aren’t already familiar with his work, I’d suggest some serious browsing to fully understand why Pinter’s lifetime of work truly deserves the gold medal, the diploma and the sweet little cheque worth US $1.3 million that takes him to the august club that entered another British writer V.S. Naipaul in its fold less than five years ago.
Deepika Shetty is a Producer with Prime Time Morning and takes care of the book segment 'Off The Shelf' as well. | 
