Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld has been shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for fiction. The award, an offshoot of Britain's better-known Man Booker novel-of-the-year prize, is awarded for a lifetime's work. It is open to authors of all nationalities whose work is available in English. American author Philip Roth once described Appelfeld as "a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own." Appelfeld was even featured as a character in Roth's book "Operation Shylock." Appelfeld was born in a suburb of Czernowitz in the province of Bucovina, which was part of Romania at the time and is now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian army invaded his hometown and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a labor camp in Romanian/Axis-controlled Transnistria. He escaped from the camp and lived for two years in the forest with animals, eventually joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. Appelfeld has written some 40 books in Hebrew, almost half of which have been translated into English. American author Marilynne Robinson and China's Yan Lianke are also among the ten finalists. Prize organizers said both China's Yan and Russian finalist Vladimir Sorokin have had books banned in their homelands. Yan fell foul of the authorities with "Dream of Ding Village," about the AIDS crisis caused by HIV-contaminated blood, and "To Serve the People," which features a character who can be aroused only when his lover smashes images of Chairman Mao. Sorokin, best known for "The Ice Trilogy," had his early books banned in Soviet times. Other finalists announced Thursday at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India include Lydia Davis of the United States, Pakistan's Intizar Husain, France's Marie NDiaye and Indian writer U.R. Ananthamurthy. Josip Novakovich a Croatia-born Canadian writer and Switzerland's Peter Stamm round out the list. Academic Christopher Ricks, who chairs the judging panel, said the ten were "astonishingly different" writers who range in age from their 40s to their 80s. Previous winners of the £60,000 ($95,000) award include Canada's Alice Munro, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Philip Roth of the United States. The prize, awarded every two years, causes fierce debate and occasional controversy. In 2011, British spy writer John le Carr asked for his name to be removed from the shortlist he said he eschewed awards and one of the jurors resigned at the choice of Roth as winner. This year's winner will be announced in London on May 22.
