The Man Booker International Prize is given out every two years by Britain’s Booker Foundation to an author who is honored for a lifetime of work in fiction. The prize comes with a £60,000 cash award. This year there are 10 finalists for the award and two are American women. The winner of the prize will be announced in May.
Marilynne Robinson, a professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, is the author of three novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Dr. Robinson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead.
Dr. Robinson is a graduate of Pembroke College. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington.
Lydia Davis, a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York system, is the author of six collections of short stories including Varieties of Disturbance and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Professor Davis is a graduate of Barnard College. In addition to writing short stories, she has translated several works from French to English.