The innovative
and influential American writer, Lydia Davis, is tonight announced as the
winner of the fifth Man Booker International Prize at an award ceremony at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Davis was chosen from a list of ten
eminent contenders.
The Man Booker
International Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on
the world stage. It is presented once every two years to a living author
for a body of work published either originally in English or available in translation
in the English language. It has previously been awarded to Ismail Kadaré in
2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009 and Philip Roth in 2011.
Lydia Davis was
born in Massachusetts in 1947. She is best known for her short stories, a number
of them among the shortest stories ever written. Her work defies generic
classification and she has been described as “the master of a literary form
largely of her own invention”. Much of her writing may be seen
under the aspect of philosophy or poetry or short story, and even the longer
pieces may be as short as two or three pages.
Davis is also
well known for her work as a translator of French literature and philosophy,
most notably for translating, to great acclaim, Marcel Proust’s complex Du
Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Her other translations include books by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and
Michel Leiris.
She has won many
of the 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. Davis 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.’
Her work includes
one novel, The End of the Story (1995) and seven story collections
including Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel
Johnson Is Indignant (2002) and Varieties of Disturbance
(2007). A new collection, Can’t and Won’t, is due to be published
in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring 2014 and in the UK by Hamish
Hamilton in June 2014.
Lydia Davis lives
in New York and is a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany,
the capital of New York State.
The judging panel
for the Man Booker International Prize 2013 consists of the scholar and
literary critic, Professor Sir Christopher Ricks (Chair); author and essayist,
Elif Batuman; writer and broadcaster, Aminatta Forna; novelist, Yiyun Li and
author and academic, Tim Parks.
Announcing the winner, Professor Sir
Christopher Ricks comments:
‘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
realize things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody’s
impure motives and illusions of feeling.’
The Man Booker
International Prize is sponsored by Man Group plc, which also sponsors the Man
Booker Prize for Fiction. The prize is significantly different from the
annual Man Booker Prize in that it highlights one writer’s continued
creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world
stage. Both prizes strive to recognise and reward the finest modern
literature.
No comments:
Post a Comment