THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2011 Winner Announced

The Bookman reporting from Sydney where the winner was announced at the Opera House about 45 minutes ago

www.themanbookerprize.com

Philip Roth is today announced as the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize at a press conference at the Sydney Opera House. Roth was chosen from a list of 13 eminent contenders including, for the first time, two Chinese novelists.

The Man Booker International Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage.  It is presented once every two years to a living author for a body of work published either originally in English or widely available in translation in the English language. It has previously been awarded to Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009.

Philip Roth is a literary giant and one of the world’s most prolific, celebrated - and controversial - writers.  When asked to name a living American who inspired him, Bruce Springsteen chose Roth, commenting, ‘….making work that is so strong, so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that’s the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain.’ 

Born in March 1933 in New Jersey, Roth is best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, and for his late-1990s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997),

I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).

Roth is the most decorated living American writer.  He won the National Book Award at 26 for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus in 1960, and in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater.  He has won two National Book Critics Circle awards, for The Counterlife in 1987 and Patrimony: A True Story in 1991, and three PEN/Faulkner awards for Operation Shylock in 1994, The Human Stain in 2001 and Everyman in 2007.  He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998 for his novel, American Pastoral.  In 2001 he was awarded the gold medal for fiction by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent awards include the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2006, and in 2007 he became the first recipient of the Pen/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Philip Roth lives in Connecticut, USA.  His most recent book, Nemesis, was published in 2010.

The judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2011 consists of writer, academic and rare-book dealer Dr Rick Gekoski (Chair), publisher, writer and critic Carmen Callil, and award-winning novelist Justin Cartwright.

Announcing the winner, Rick Gekoski comments:

“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.

“His career is remarkable in that he starts at such a high level, and keeps getting better. In his 50s and 60s, when most novelists are in decline, he wrote a string of novels of the highest, enduring quality. Indeed, his most recent, Nemesis (2010), is as fresh, memorable, and alive with feeling as anything he has written. His is an astonishing achievement.”

Philip Roth comments:

“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 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.”

The winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2011 is announced from Sydney during the Sydney Writers’ Festival.  A festival event on 19 May will feature an exclusive filmed interview with Roth by novelist and critic Benjamin Taylor.  The chair of the judges, Rick Gekoski, will discuss the judging process which saw much passionate debate over different candidates and how the winner was eventually decided.

Roth’s award will be celebrated at a formal dinner in London on 28 June 2011.

The prize is sponsored by Man Group plc, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize in that it highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.  Both prizes strive to recognise and reward the finest modern literature.