Storyteller

Lydia Davis Wins Man Booker International Prize

Following past winners Ismail Kadaré, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, and Philip Roth.

The short-story writer and translator Lydia Davis has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize, awarded for achievement in fiction on the world stage. Davis's stories, many of them miniatures, are sometimes only a sentence long, like this one: "I was recently denied a writing prize because they said I was lazy." They have been regarded as some of the most precise, poetic, inventive, and intelligent writing in our time. She is also known for her English translations of French literature like Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Previous winners of the Man Booker International Prize have been Ismail Kadaré, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, and Philip Roth.