Alumni News & Notes - University at Albany

Janie Airey
Lydia Davis Painting With Words
University at Albany professor and writer-in-residence
Lydia Davis, who has published a chapbook of observations
of three cows that graze across the road from her rural
Rensselaer County house, is the 2013 winner of the Man
Booker International Prize. The prestigious literary award,
presented in London last May, carries a cash prize of
£60,000 (roughly $91,000).
“She is a unique fiction writer who writes very short stories
that are highly reflective, kind of ironic and sometimes
comical. They play with the very concept of what
storytelling is,” said Donald Faulkner, director of the
New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany.
“This is a wonderful tribute and great recognition of a
brilliant writer,” said fiction writer and UAlbany faculty
member Lynne Tillman, who shares an office with Davis
and teaches a fiction workshop with her. “She’s very
observant of the world around her. I think of her as
making paintings with words.”
Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the Booker Prize judges,
said that Davis’ fictions “fling their lithe arms wide
to embrace many a kind ... They have been called stories
but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes,
parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms,
prayers or simply observations.”
In the first sentence of “Cows,” Davis, 66, writes: “Each
new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn,
it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play.”
Davis, recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, is also an
acclaimed translator of classic works of French literature
into English. She was named a Chevalier of the Order of
Arts and Letters in France for her translations of Proust
and Flaubert.
“She is an excellent editor, great teacher and sympathetic
reader who has helped a lot of young writers,” Faulkner
said. “She’s not a prima donna on any level.”
After she won the MacArthur grant, Davis chose to
remain in the classroom. “I’ve realized I miss working with
undergraduate students because they make me laugh and
their writing can be very exciting and unexpected,” the
Writers Institute Fellow told the Times Union in 2005.
22 UAlbany Magazine • Fall 2013