Lydia Davis has been awarded the fifth Man Booker International Prize at an award ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage. Chairman of the judges Sir Christopher Ricks said Davis's "writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations."
Not only a writer (she has nine collections of stories and one novel), Davis is also a renowned translator, having recently done acclaimed translations of Swann's Way and Madame Bovary. Her translation work led her to be named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.
Previous winners of the prize are Ismail Kadaré, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth. The judges were Ricks, Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim Parks.
