Cynthia Ozick describes herself as a 'writer's writer'. Critics hail her as one of the leading figures in American letters, but she has only recently attained a wide international readership.
With her 2005 novel The Bear Boy, which became a best-seller and sent Ozick on her first book tour, she finally acquired the wider audience critics have long felt she deserves. 'There has been a disconnect between the reviews and the readership,' says Ozick from New York, in her tinkly, girlish voice.
That same year Ozick was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Booker International lifetime achievement award, among such luminaries as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike and Milan Kundera. She says she felt 'baffled and abashed' by her inclusion on the list: 'I knew people would say, 'Who in the world is that?''
Ozick, who turned 80 this year, was presented with two lifetime achievement laurels in May: the PEN/Nabokov award for 'enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship', and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, an award given annually since 1988 in the memory of Jewish-American writer Bernard Malamud.
The PEN/Nabokov judges laud Ozick for 'a prodigious imagination, a relentless intellectual and [an] endless appetite for investigation and truth telling', while according to Alan Cheuse of the PEN/Malamud selection committee: 'No American writer working today is as close in soul and style to Bernard Malamud as Cynthia Ozick, and no American writer working today is more distinctive in everything she does on the page.'
Although Ozick was sometimes categorised alongside late Jewish-American legends Malamud, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow, she resists the 'Jewish writer' label.