One-sentence story writer wins Booker prize

ANauthor who writes stories the length of a sentence has scooped this year’s Man Booker International Prize.

American Lydia Davis writes stories of conventional length, but most are from one to three pages. Others are just a paragraph or sentence long.

She was picked from a 10-name shortlist to win the fifth Man Booker International Prize, presented every two years for “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.

The £60,000 prize is for a body of work published originally in English or available in translation in English.

Davis’s stories are among the shortest ever written. She has been described as “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention”.

One of her stories, A Double Negative, read simply: “At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

The author has said of her own writing: “I think as long as there’s a bit of narrative, or just a situation, I can get away with calling them stories.”

She began wr i t i n g miniature stories while translating French novelist Marcel Proust. “I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. Andit was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences,” she has said.

“The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be.”

Davis, who lives in New York, was awarded the prize at a ceremony in London.