Author of the week: Philip Roth

last updated 8 January 2015

Winning this year's Man Booker International Prize came as a mixed blessing for Philip Roth, said Julie Bosman in The New York Times. Roth, 78, won $100,000 along with the citation, and the British panel that chose him for the lifetime-achievement honor noted that his work across five decades had "reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction." Yet one judge, feminist publisher Carmen Callil, took exception to that characterization. Callil resigned from the panel over the decision to honor Roth, calling his work self-centered and a case of "the emperor's clothes." "He goes on and on about the same subject in every book," Callil told the London Guardian. "It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe. In 20 years' time, will anyone read him?"

The enduring popularity of many of Roth's novels suggests that Callil may be off on this one, said Benjamin Taylor in the London Telegraph. Yet Roth says he initially didn't see himself as a writer either. During college, he was planning to study law when he "discovered" literature. "I was overcome," he says, and became determined to write himself. "I didn't think I would make a living," he says. Incidentally, it wasn't until he started winning awards, beginning with a National Book Award for 1959's Goodbye, Columbus, that he decided he could pursue his vocation full time. He's been prolific and protean since, though there's one aspect of his writing about which he might agree with Callil. "No one has written worse plays than me," he says.