Grossman wins Man Booker
Israeli aeli author thor David Grossmanossman won the Man Booker r International Prize on Wednesday, sharing the 50,000 pound ($ 64,000) award with translator Jessica Cohen.
Grossman, the first Israeli writer to win the prize, is now expected to enjoy a spike in international sales for A Horse Walks Into a Bar.
The book unfolds over the course of a stand- up show during which comedian Dovelah Gee exposes a wound he has been living with for years and the difficult choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.
“Thank you all. I will cherish this award and this evening,” Grossman said after receiving the prize at a ceremony in central London.
“I thank first of all my wonderful, devoted, translator, Jessica Cohen,” the 63- year- old author added.
Judge Nick Barley said Grossman “attempted an ambitious high- wire act of a novel, and... pulled it off spectacularly.”
“We were bowled over by Grossman’s willingness to take emotional as well as stylistic risks: Every sentence counts, every word matters in this supreme example of the writer’s craft,” Barley noted.
Since he started writing in the late 1970s after
being firedfi from publicpub radio following anger ove over his critical covera coverage, Grossman has wo won numerous Israeli and international awards.
His 1986 novel See Under: Love is seen by a number of critics as his masterpiece, delving into the Holocaust and the generation of Jews that followed.
Grossman’s works have been translated into more than 30 languages and he was also decorated with France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.
In 2011 he was part of a group of seven prominent writers from around the world to appeal to the UN Security Council to sanction the Syrian government over its actions in the civil war which began that year.
The international edition of Britain’s Man Booker Prize was introduced in 2005 and up to 2016 was awarded in recognition of a body of work by a living author whose work was written or available in English.
From 2016 the prize has been given for a single work of fiction that has been translated into English and published in Britain.