MANILA, Philippines — Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth with the £60,000 award. Dismissing the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Callil said that “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe”.

One of three judges on the panel for the literary award, alongside rare book dealer and author Rick Gekoski, who acted as chair, and novelist Justin Cartwright, Callil revealed that after the decision was made to give the prize to Roth from a shortlist which also featured Philip Pullman, Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson, she decided to retire from the panel.

“I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine," said Callil. "Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine... Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?”

Founder of the feminist publishing house Virago, Callil is also the author of Bad Faith, a history of Vichy France. "We should have discussed everything more, but Philip Roth came out like a thunderbolt, and I was too surprised. We took a couple of days to brood, and then I spoke to Justin and said I thought I should give in, if I didn't have to have anything to do with the winner. So I said I didn't want my name attached to it, and retired. You can't be asked to judge, and then not judge."

Gekoski, speaking from the Sydney Writers' festival, said that the decision to give the prize to Roth had been reached "slowly and with a great deal of discussion and a considerable amount of argument".

All three judges, said Gekoski, "felt very, very strongly about the reading, about the process, about who should win".

“In 1959 he writes Goodbye, Columbus and it's a masterpiece, magnificent. Fifty-one years later he's 78 years old and he writes Nemesis and it is so wonderful, such a terrific novel ... Tell me one other writer who 50 years apart writes masterpieces," Gekoski said. "Philip Roth, though, gets better and better in middle age. In the 1990s he was almost incapable of not writing a masterpiece – The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, I Married a Communist. He was 65-70 years old, what the hell's he doing writing that well?”

In her Guardian Review column, Callil also writes of her disappointment that the prize failed to celebrate writers in translation – the shortlist also included the Chinese authors Wang Anyi and Su Tong, the Spanish Juan Goytisolo, Italian Dacia Maraini and Lebanese Amin Maalouf – honoring instead "yet another North American writer".

The prize in his view, though, is “not about who's the best: I think that's fatuous". Instead, it's about honouring "achievement in fiction”.

“Are we saying Philip Roth is the best living novelist in the world? I don't know I want to say that. But he is the one we have chosen to honour and there are very good reasons for that,” he said.