Lydia Davis wins Booker International Prize 2013
Lydia Davis, the shortest of all short story writers, whose works can
be as brief as a single sentence, has won the fifth Man Booker
International Prize.
 The influential American writer accepted the £60,000 honour, which is
presented every two years to a living, non-UK author for a body of work
published in English, at a ceremony held at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London.
Davis, 65, was chosen from a heavyweight list of ten contenders
including U.R. Ananthamurthy of India, Chinese writer Yan Lianke and
Vladimir Sorokin of Russia.
The Massachusetts-born Davis is best known for her short stories, a
number of them among the shortest ever published. She has been described
as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention".
Her work, closer to essayist poems and philosophical monologues than
conventional short stories, includes the story collections Break It
Down(1986), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002) and Varieties of
Disturbance (2007)..
Typically her stories run for between three and four pages. But many
are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence.
The New Yorker praised her "lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal
originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure,
and human wisdom."
Davis, who is married to artist Alan Cote, has influenced a
generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace
and Dave Eggers, who wrote that Davis, "blows the roof off of so many of
our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."
Currently professor of creative writing at the University at Albany,
the capital of New York State, Davis is due to publish her next
collection of short stories, Can't and Won't, in June 2014.
Davis is also well known for her work as a translator of French
literature and philosophy. Her translations include Marcel Proust's Du
Côté de Chez Swann (Swann's Way) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Announcing the winner, Booker judge Professor Sir Christopher Ricks
said: "Lydia Davis' writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many
a kind. Just how to categorise them? Should we simply concur with the
official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes?
Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms?
Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for
observations? "There is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative
attention.
Vigilance as how to realise things down to the very word or syllable;
vigilance as to everybody's impure motives and illusions of feeling."
Davis has previously won major American writing awards, including a
MacArthur Fellowship for fiction and was named a Chevalier of the Order
of Arts and Letters by the French government.
The Booker International prize has previously been awarded to Ismail
Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009 and Philip
Roth in 2011...
- The Independent
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