Short story writer and translator (from the French) Lydia Davis has been announced as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2013. The prize, worth £60,000, is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The other finalists were UR Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), Marilynne Robinson (USA), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland).
The winner is chosen at the discretion of the judging panel and there are no submissions from publishers. The judges base their decision on a writer’s entire body of work rather than on a single, or the most recent, work. Previous winners have been Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth. The judges on this occasion were Sir Christopher Ricks, Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim Parks
The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009.
