Man Booker International Prize to American author, Lydia Davis

 

Congratulations to Lydia Davis, the American author who last week was awarded the fifth Man Booker International Prize at a ceremony in London. The prize, honoring an achievement in fiction on the world stage, is the sibling of the Man Booker Prize -- one of the world's premier literary awards -- given annually to a novel written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, or the Republic of Ireland. 

Davis, described as the shortest of all short story writers, has produced several collections of stories, some of which are only one or two sentences long. For example: 

"Idea for a Short Documentary Film" 

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

Many writers -- Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers are frequently cited -- have credited Davis with being hugely influential on their own work. Eggers once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction." Previously a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, Davis teaches creative writing at the University of Albany and is also an accomplished translator of classics from the French, including Proust's Swann's Way and Flaubert's Madame Bouvary.

Previous winners of the Man Booker International Prize include Philip Roth in 2011, Canadian novelist Alice Munro in 2009, the late Nigerian poet and novelist Chinua Achebe in 2007, and Albanian writer Ismail Kadare in 2005.

If you haven't read Lydia Davis's stories before, take the award as a reason to have a look at her books. Currently on order at The Book Stall are Break It Down: Stories, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and Two American Scenes.