Philip Roth wins Man Booker Inter

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American writer Philip Roth has been awarded the biannual Man Booker International Prize for fiction, it was announced on Wednesday.
Seventy-eight-year-old Roth is best known for his trilogy American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). He beat competition from other 12 shortlisted authors, including Indian-born author Rohinton Mistry, American writer Anne Tyler and Britain’s Philip Pullman.
The biannual £60,000 Man Booker International Prize, instituted in 2004, was first awarded to Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré in 2005. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was awarded the prize in 2007 and Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2009. Indian author Mahasweta Devi and Indian-origin Nobel laureate Sir Vidia Naipaul were in contention for the award in 2009, but were beaten by Munro.
The shortlist of 13 authors, announced in March, headed into a controversy after British spy writer John le Carré asked the prize administrators to withdraw his nomination. Le Carré does not allow his books to be submitted for any literary prizes. The prize administrators kept Le Carré on the shortlist, but did not consider him for the final prize after his request. The jury, headed by writer, academic and rare-book dealer Dr Rick Gekoski, while announcing Roth as the winner of the prize at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Wednesday praised him for his “astonishing achievement.”
“For more than 50 years Philip Roth’s books have stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience. His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally,” Dr Gekoski said. London will host an awards ceremony for the prize on June 28.
“I would like to thank the judges of the Man Booker Prize for awarding me this esteemed prize. One of the particular pleasures I’ve had as a writer is to have my work read internationally despite all the heartaches of translation that entails. I hope the prize will bring me to the attention of readers around the world who are not familiar with my work. This is a great honour and I’m delighted to receive it,” Roth said in a statement.