06:42 ET<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe Booker International Prize judging panel was “animated by disagreement” over the decision to recognise author Philip Roth, its chairman has revealed.<\/p>\n
“When you judge a literary prize, taste and judgement collide [and] egos can be bruised,” said Dr Rick Gekoski at an awards ceremony in central London.<\/p>\n
Roth, 78, did not attend the event, but sent a short film instead.<\/p>\n
One of the judges, feminist publisher Carmen Callil, resigned in protest over his selection in May.<\/p>\n
The prize made headlines earlier this year when spy novelist John le Carre asked for his name to be taken off the shortlist.<\/p>\n
The award has previously been presented to Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Canadian author Alice Munro.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Tuesday, Dr Gekoski saluted Callil’s “ferocious commitment” while acknowledging Roth’s work divided opinion.<\/p>\n
“I can recall few of his novels that don’t provoke an occasional but overwhelming desire to shout ‘will you shut up!’ at a character or his author,” he told an audience at London’s Banqueting House.<\/p>\n
“How often, reading him, do we pause for breath, put the book down, pace about, sit down, chuck a pail of water over our heads?<\/p>\n
“The challenge is inexorable, and sometimes infuriating,” he continued. “As a reader you cannot but respond, and you have a choice.<\/p>\n
“You can decide that you are being bullied, hectored, asked too much for too little, and walk away.<\/p>\n
“Or you may believe, as I do, that the fierceness of the demands of a Roth novel is so potent… that you are positively anxious to come out for the next round.”<\/p>\n
Roth, the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize, is best known for his controversial 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint.<\/p>\n
His other books include Goodbye, Columbus, American Pastoral – for which he received the Pulitzer Prize – and 2010’s Nemesis.<\/p>\n
Roth read the final pages of the latter work in his film, saying they represented “the end of the line after 31 books”.<\/p>\n
Set during World War II, Nemesis – described as “masterful” by Dr Gekoski – tells of a polio outbreak in New Jersey.<\/p>\n
In May, Callil said she withdrew from the Man Booker panel after her fellow judges decided to give Roth the \u00a360,000 prize.<\/p>\n
“I don’t rate him as a writer at all,” she told the Guardian. “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.”<\/p>\n
Over a long and distinguished career, Roth has been censured by some for his alleged misogyny and attacked by others for his purported anti-semitism.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC’s Front Row programme this month, the author said such critics of his work were “cuckoo” and “don’t know what they are talking about”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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