[attach id=264472 size="medium"]Lydia Davis after winning the prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: PA[/attach]

An author who pens stories the length of a sentence has scooped this year’s Man Booker Inter-national Prize.

American writer Lydia Davis has written some short stories of conventional length but most range from one to three pages while others are just a paragraph or sentence long.

Davis was picked from a shortlist of 10 names to win the fifth Man Booker International Prize, which is presented once every two years for achievement in fiction on the world stage.

The £60,000 prize is awarded to a living author for a body of work published originally in English or available in translation in English.

Davis’s stories are among the shortest ever written and she has been described as “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention”.

One of her shortest stories, A Double Negative, read simply: “At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

I think as long as there’s a bit of narrative, or just a situation, I can get away with calling them stories

The author, who lives in New York, has said of her own writing: “I think as long as there’s a bit of narrative, or just a situation, I can get away with calling them stories.”

She began to write miniature stories while translating French novelist Proust.

“The sheer length of a thought of Proust didn’t make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke.”

Davis’s work includes one novel, The End of the Story (1995) and seven story collections including Break it Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002) and Varieties of Disturbance (2007).