Canada author Alice Munro wins Nobel

Oct. 10: Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature today. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Munro is a “master of the contemporary short story”.

Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, told a writer from The Globe and Mail earlier this year that she planned to retire after Dear Life, her 14th story collection.

In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Munro said that she was “amazed, and very grateful”.

She added, “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians,” she said. “I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.”

Munro revolutionised the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place and then moving backward or forward in time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that her admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural Canada.

She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her famous, somewhat by accident.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told the New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”

The Nobel, one of the most prestigious and lucrative prizes in the world, is given to a writer for a lifetime’s body of work, rather than a single novel, short story or collection. The winner receives 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.

Previous winners in recent years include Mo Yan, a Chinese writer, in 2012; the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, in 2011; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, in 2010; and in 2009, Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist and essayist.

The 18 members of the Swedish Academy choose the winner in secrecy and reveal the nominees after each award is announced.

Each year, a handful of the same names are floated as contenders, including the Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. This year, Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking firm, gave the odds to Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author of 1Q84, at 5-2, followed by Munro, at 4-1.

Roth and Munro were the subject of even more intense speculation than usual this year.

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131011/jsp/foreign/story_17448096.jsp
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