PHILIP ROTH WINS MAN BOOKER PRIZE!!!

Philip Roth, chronicler of 'the sexually liberated Jew in postwar America', beats stellar shortlist to take the fourth Man Booker International prize.

PHILIP ROTH, giant of American letters, has won the 2011 Man Booker International award. The author, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, was named winner of the Man Booker International at the Sydney Writers' Festival today, beating a stellar, if eclectic, shortlist. Also in the running were the British children's author Philip Pullman, award-winning Chinese writer Su Tong, American authors Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson, Australia's David Malouf and a reluctant John le Carré, who had asked – unsuccessfully – for his name to be withdrawn from contention. Announcing the winner, Rick Gekoski, chair of the judges, said that for 50 years, 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," said Gekoski. "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."