Philip Roth

Philip Roth, one of America's most prolific and controversial novelists, was named winner of the £60,000 Man Booker International Prize awarded every two years for a body of work published either originally in English or widely available in English translation.

He beat a formidable line-up of 12 contenders that included Rohinton Mistry and John Le Carre.

Roth (78) is best-known for his 1969 novel “Portnoy's Complaint,” and for his late-1990s trilogy comprising “American Pastoral” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998; “I Married a Communist;” and “The Human Stain.”

Judges praised him for his “imagination” and, especially, the way he had dealt with the notion of Jewish identity in his novels.

His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally,” said the Chair of the judging panel, Rick Gekoski, well-known American writer and broadcaster.

Describing Roth's career as an “astonishing achievement,” he said: “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.”

In a brief statement, Roth said he hoped the award would bring him to the attention of those who were not familiar with his work. “One of the particular pleasures I've had as a writer is to have my work read despite all the heartaches of translation 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,” he said.

Previous winners include Ismail Kadaré , Chinua Achebe and Alice Munro.

List of awards

1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus

1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife

1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony

1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock

1995 National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater

1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral

1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist

1998 National Medal of Arts

2000 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) for American Pastoral

2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain

2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters

2001 WH Smith Literary Award for The Human Stain

2002 National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

2003 Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University

2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America

About Roth

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language."

Roth has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award.

He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured his best-known character, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction and for its "supple, ingenious style.