Lydia Davis is an American writer and translator. Davis was born in 1947 and grew up in a very intellectual environment as the daughter of Hope Hale Davis, an American feminist and writer and Robert Gorham David, a university professor. She has lived in Austria, Ireland and in France for several years.
Davis is most notable for her works of flash fiction (fiction that is made up of an extremely low word count, often pre-set) and for translating several French classics into English (among them Flaubert’s Madame Bovary). Davis was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2003 as well as the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
Davis’s writings are well known for their sharp, witty and intense observations of everyday life, especially in her flash fiction, where stories are sometimes comprised of as few as 2 sentences. Grand often portrays the mundane and bland in a way that provokes deeper thoughts.
She credits American prose poet Russell Edson as her inspiration for branching out of traditional forms of storytelling and experiment with language to develop her unique style of writing. Due to their unique style and content, her short fictions are sometimes referred to as poems, jokes or parables. As of 2019, Davis has published six collections of short stories, one novel and one collection of essays.
