A CANADIAN SHORT story writer has become just the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Alice Munro is the first Canadian to win the prize since 1976 and will collect a US$1.2 million cheque from the Swedish Academy. She is also unusual in that her work is almost entirely short stories with “Lives of Girls and Women” her only novel.
However, Munro hasn’t spoken to the Academy yet.
The official Twitter page for the Nobel Prize said that they had been trying to get a hold of her, but with no joy.
She did, however, speak to The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia.
“I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win,” the 82-year-old said. Her fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood, who had been one of the favourites for the prize, tweeted her approval of the choice.
In announcing the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”
“She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection,” the academy’s secretary Peter Englund told The Associated Press.
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