Joyce Carol Oates
- Born
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer who published her first book in 1963 and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry and non-fiction
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind ‘52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates was shortlisted for The Man International Booker Prize 2009.
Background
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.