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.
