(JTA) — Jewish author Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize for the body of work in his more than 50-year career.
The biennial award for Roth, 78, was announced Wednesday and will be presented in June in London. The prize comes with an award of nearly $100,000.
Roth, the author of the widely read and controversial "Potnoy’s Complaint," also has won two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. He is well known for creating the character Nathan Zuckerman, often considered a Roth alter-ego.
Authors on the shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize included Rohinton Mistry, Philip Pullman and Anne Tyler, as well as Chinese novelists Wang Anyi and Su Tong. Previous winners include the Canadian writer Alice Munro, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.
The annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded for a single book.
Following the announcement, author and publisher Carmen Callil withdrew from the prize’s three-judge panel, citing her displeasure with giving the award to Roth, the Guardian reported.
"He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book," Callil was quoted as saying in the London paper. "It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe."
