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SYDNEY: American novelist Philip Roth was on Wednesday announced as the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize, beating off competition from 12 other authors.
The award is presented every two years for an achievement in fiction on the world stage.
“For more than 50 years Philip Roth's books have stimulated, provoked, and amused an enormous, and still expanding audience,” chairman of the judging panel Rick Gekoski said in announcing the prize in Sydney. “His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally.”
Roth is a literary giant and one of the world's most prolific and celebrated writers.
He is best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, and for his late-1990s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).
Roth is the most decorated living American writer, winning the National Book Award at 26 for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus in 1960, and in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater.
He has won two National Book Critics Circle awards and three PEN/Faulkner awards. In 2001 he was awarded the gold medal for fiction by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book, Nemesis, was published in 2010.
“For more than 50 years Philip Roth's books have stimulated, provoked, and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience,” said the chairman of the Booker judging panel, writer and rare-book dealer Rick Gekoski.
“His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally.”
The Man Booker International Prize is different from the better known Man Booker Prize, which is given annually to writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, in that it highlights one author's overall body of work.
It has previously been won by Albanian author Ismail Kadare in 2005, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro of Canada in 2009.
The award was somewhat overshadowed this year by British thriller writer John le Carre asking that his name be withdrawn from the shortlist because “I do not compete for literary prizes”.
The 2011 prize was the first to include Chinese authors in Wang Anyi, whose Shanghai novels include “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”, and Su Tong, writer of “Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas”.
Indian-Canadian Rohinton Mistry and US writer Anne Tyler were also in the running this year.
