Philip Roth emerged the winner out of a list of thirteen eminent writers – including two Chinese wrtiers. The award will be presented on 28th June 2011 at a formal dinner in London but it has been reported that Roth would not be able to attend the award ceremony.
The Man Booker International Prize is awarded every two years to a living writer for overall contribution to fiction. It is distinct from the Man Booker Prize for Fiction which is awarded every year and for a book selected for that year.
The Man Booker International Prize has been awarded in the previous years (ever since its institution in 2005) to Ismail Kadare in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009. The organisers said that the award and the £60,000 prize money is presented to a writer for his/her “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.
Philip Roth, aged 78, said: “This is a great honour and I’m delighted to receive it.”
Roth added: “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.”
Philip Roth was born in Newark (New Jersey) on 19th March, 1933. He authored his first book “Goodbye, Columbus” at the age of 26 and was awarded the National Book Award. He is famous for his “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969) and for his tirlogy consisting of “American Pastoral” (1997), “I Married a Communist” (1998), and “The Human Stain” (2000).
The book “American Pastoral” was awarded the Pulitzer Ptize in 1998; and, in 2001, “The Human Stain” was awarded the “WH Smith Literary Award” (UK) for the best book of the year.
Roth has won two National Book Awards (in 1960 and 1995) for “Goodbye, Columbus”‘ (1959) and “Sabbath’s Theatre” (1995) – and twice more he was among the finalists. He has also won two National Book Critics Circle awards (for “The Counterlife” and “Patrimony”), three PEN/Faulkner awards (for “Operation Shylock”, “The Human Stain”, and “Everyman”), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for “American Pastoral”). In 2006 he was honoured with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2007, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction was bestowed on Roth.
Philip Roth was awarded an honourary Doctor of Letters by Harvard University in 2003.
Roth was also awarded a gold medal for fiction by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Roth was conferred the Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. He got the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 for “The Plot Against America” (2004); the book was also awarded the Jeames Fenimore Cooper Prize for best Historical Fiction by the Society of American Hisorians.
Dr Rick Gekoski, writer, academic and rare-book dealer,is the Chairman of the Panel of Judges. Carmen Callil, a writer and critic, and Justin Cartwright, an award-winning South African novelist, are the other members of the Panel of Judges for the fourth Man Booker International Prize.
Dr.Gekoski said: “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,” he added.
Roth’s writings haven’t found favour with feminists who have objected to his focus on explicit male sexuality. A voice of dissent from the Panel’s decision, perhaps reflecting the feminist standpoint – and marring the award to Roth, comes from Carmen Callil, one of the other two judges on the panel.
Carmen Callil, a writer and founder of the feminist publishing house Virago, said: “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” She added “I don’t rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire – all the others were fine.” She asked “.. in 20 years’ time will anyone read him?”
Callil was overruled by Justin Cartwright and Rick Gekoski, the other judges.
