Stories just one sentence long earns book prize

Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize.Photo / AP

An author who pens stories the length of a sentence has scooped this year's Man Booker International Prize.

American writer Lydia Davis has written some short stories of conventional length, but most range from one to three pages, while others are just a paragraph or sentence long.

Davis was picked from a short list of 10 names to win the fifth Man Booker International Prize, which is presented once every two years for "achievement in fiction on the world stage".

The 60,000 pound (NZ$111,820) prize is awarded to a living author for a body of work published originally in English or available in translation in English.

Davis' stories are among the shortest ever written and she has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention".

One of her shortest 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."

Davis, who lives in New York, was announced as the winner at a ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, chair of the judging panel and a literary critic and scholar, credited Davis with being able to "realise things down to the very word or syllable" and with "vigilance as to everybody's impure motives and illusions of feeling."

Previous recipients of the award have been Albanian author Ismail Kadare, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Canadian Alice Munro and most recently, American author Philip Roth in 2011.

Davis' work includes one novel, The End Of The Story (1995) and seven story collections including Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002) and Varieties of Disturbance (2007).

- PAA