19 May 2011

Body of work by Roth recognised

8:10 am on 19 May 2011

American novelist Philip Roth has won the biennial Man Booker International Prize for a body of work stretching over more than half a century.

Roth, 78, has received a number of other awards including two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

He is best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and American Pastoral which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Nemesis is his latest work, about a polio epidemic in the 1940s.

The Man Booker International Prize honours a writer's body of work as opposed to the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which is awarded for a single book.

The award as announced at the Sydney Opera House.

Previous winners were Ismail Kadare of Albania in 2005, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria in 2007 and Alice Munro of Canada in 2009.