Lydia Davis pips Indian writer U.R. Ananthamurthy to win Booker International Prize 2013

American short story writer Lydia Davis, whose works can be as brief as a single sentence, has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize topling other authors including an Indian named U.R. Ananthamurthy.

The influential American writer accepted the 60,000 pounds honour, which is presented every two years to a living, non-UK author for a body of work published in English, at a ceremony held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Davis, 65, was chosen from a heavyweight list of ten contenders including Ananthamurthy, Chinese writer Yan Lianke and Vladimir Sorokin of Russia, the Independent reported.

The Massachusetts-born Davis is best known for her short stories, a number of them among the shortest ever published.

She has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention".

Her work, closer to essayist poems and philosophical monologues than conventional short stories, includes the story collections Break It Down (1986), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002) and Varieties of Disturbance (2007).

Typically her stories run for between three and four pages. But many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence.

Davis has previously won major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.