Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize for Literature
October 10, 2013
Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature. Making the announcement today, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Munro as a master of the 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.”
Munro began writing fiction while studying at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. The stories explore life in a fictional small Ontario town similar to the one in which she was born and raised.
Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature. (AP Wide World)
Munro has since published more than a dozen short story collections, including Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Progress of Love (1986), Open Secrets (1994), and The View from Castle Rock (2006). Many of Munro’s later stories depict the tangled relationships between men and women, the complications of marriage, and the difficulties individuals encounter recognizing their own motivations. Often compared with the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Munro’s most consistent theme has been how young women come to terms with the trials of rural life. Her stories are generally set in small towns in her native southwest Ontario, “because I live life here at a level of irritation which I would not achieve in a place that I knew less well.” “There are no such things as big and little subjects,” she stated in a recent interview. “The major things, the evils, that exist in the world have a direct relationship to the evil that exists around a dining room table when people are doing things to each other.”
Alice Laidlaw Munro was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario. In 1951, she married James Munro. She married her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, in 1976, and the couple settled in Clinton, Ontario, a small town near Lake Huron. Fremlin, died earlier this year, and Munro subsequently disclosed that her latest book, Dear Life, published in 2012, would be her last.
Munro will be presented with the Nobel Prize for literature at a formal ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who established the prize. In 2009, Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work.
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