Prague - Former Czech president and writer Vaclav Havel described British playwright Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve aged 78, as an "outstanding dramatist whom I have admired since my youth."

"His plays are wonderful," he continued.

The two writers met in the 1980s when Pinter visited the dissident Havel in the former Czechoslovakia.

"The solidarity that he displayed towards both myself and my friends during the time of the resistance was of great importance. I knew he was ill and his death has dealt me a hard blow," Havel said.

Havel has said on other occasions that Pinter had been a great influence on his work.

Meanwhile, Germany's Academy of Arts expressed its sadness at the death of a person it called "one of the most important playwrights in postwar British theatre."

"We bow to an author whose rebellious spirit and alert, international attentiveness deeply impressed us," the academy's president, Klaus Staeck, said in a statement released in Berlin.

Staeck also referred to Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2005 in which he attacked the US invasion of Iraq as "a bandit act" that demonstrated "absolute contempt for the concept of international law."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that Pinter was "a great dramatist and perceptive humanist who was uncompromising and intransigent." (dpa)