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Alice Munro Wins Nobel Literature Prize First Canadian to Bag Honor After Saul Bellow

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Alice Munro Wins Nobel Literature Prize First Canadian to Bag Honor After Saul Bellow International FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2013 Alice Munro wins Nobel literature prize First Canadian to bag honor after Saul Bellow STOCKHOLM: Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving documenter of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature yester- day, the Swedish Academy said. Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award since Saul Bellow, who left for the US as a boy and won in 1976. Seen as a modern Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and per- sonalities without passing judgment on her characters. She is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” and is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s prize, Canada’s highest literary honor. “I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win,” Munro said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia. The award is likely to be the capstone to her career. Munro told Canada’s National Post in June that she was “probably not going to write anymore.” The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, said he had not managed to get hold of her but left a message on her answering machine. “She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a lit- tle bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivat- ed it almost to perfection,” Englund told The Associated Press. Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. Fellow Canadian writer Atwood - who also figured prominently in the Nobel buzz - Tweeted “Hooray! Alice Munro wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Canadian author Alice Munro who has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Literature Prize. — AFP Literature.” Munro’s published work often turns on the difference undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a between Munro’s youth in Wingham, a conservative Canada. nursing home. The narrative begins in a relatively tender, Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has revolution of the 1960s. James Munro, had three children and became a full-time been unfaithful in the past and didn’t always regret it - In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the ‘60s as housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and “What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being.” “wonderful.” It was “because, having been born in 1931, I depressed she could barely write a full sentence. Her good The wife, meanwhile, has fallen for a man at the nursing was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. home. couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults Some have called her “the greatest author in North around,” she said. Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resur- America and yes I tend to agree with that,” said the acade- teacher, was born Alice Anne Laidlaw. She was a literary faced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, my’s Englund. “We’re not saying just that she can say a lot in person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a “Dance of the Happy Shades,” came out in 1968 and won just 20 pages - more than an average novel writer can - but forbidden passion. “It was glory I was after ... walking the the Governor’s prize. also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short streets like an exile or a spy,” recalls the narrator of Munro’s She later married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. Her sto- story that covers decades and it works.” Last year’s Nobel lit- “Lives of Girls and Women,” a novel published in 1971. ries are usually set in Ontario, her home province. Among erature award went to Mo Yan of China. The 2013 Nobel She received a scholarship to study at the University of her best known is “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the announcements continue today with the Nobel Peace Prize, Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an story of a woman who begins losing her memory and followed by the economics prize on Monday. — AP Munro, a master of the short story Nobel Literature: TORONTO: Canadian writer Alice Munro, who won the Nobel from Giller consideration, saying she wanted to give younger, The past 15 winners Prize for Literature yesterday, is an admitted short-story addict less-established authors an opportunity.She was largely ignored early in her career by international audiences, but who has garnered international praise for her tales of the STOCKHOLM: struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town began building a reputation when her stories started getting Canadian short story writer Alice Munro Canada. She became the second Canadian-born writer to win published in the New Yorker magazine in the 1970s. was on Thursday awarded this year’s Nobel Literature Prize by the Swedish Academy. the prize, although she is the first winner with a distinctly Her noted works include “Lives of Girls and Women” (1973), Here is a list of the 15 most recent winners of the Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won the award in 1976, “The Love of a Good Woman” (1998) and “Runaway” (2004). A coveted award: was born in Quebec, but raised in Chicago and is widely con- collection of her work, “Too Much Happiness: Stories,” was 2013: Alice Munro (Canada) sidered an American writer. published in 2009. 2012: Mo Yan (China) The 82-year-old Munro, who won the Man Booker Earlier this year, Munro, who in 2009 revealed she had International Prize in 2009 and was often mentioned as a undergone heart bypass surgery and had been treated for 2011: Tomas Transtroemer (Sweden) Nobel contender, stands out in a literary world that tends to cancer, said she was retiring from writing. She said the same 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) reward novels. She told the Wall Street Journal in 2009, after thing in 2006, but went on to publish “Too Much Happiness” 2009: Herta Mueller (Germany) winning the Man Booker prize, that she used to attempt to in 2009 and her most recent collection, “Dear Life,” in 2012. 2008: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (France) write novels but “didn’t get anywhere.” “The novel would Munro is known for her ability to develop characters fully in 2007: Doris Lessing (Britain) always break down about halfway through and I would lose the expanse of a short story. Comparing her to other writers, 2006: Orhan Pamuk (Turkey) interest in it, and it didn’t seem any good and I wouldn’t per- author Joyce Carol Oates described Munro’s stories in a New 2005: Harold Pinter (Britain) sist,” she told the paper. Instead, she published a series of York Times review as having “the density - moral, emotional, 2004: Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) highly praised short story collections, beginning with 1968’s sometimes historical - of other writers’ novels.” Munro, Oates 2003: J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) “Dance of the Happy Shades.” wrote, scripts “fictitious worlds that are mimetic paradigms of 2002: Imre Kertesz (Hungary) In addition to the Man Booker, she has won the Giller Prize utterly real worlds yet are fictions, composed with so assured 2001: V.S. Naipaul (Britain) Canada’s most high-profile literary award - twice, and has won an art that it might be mistaken for artlessness.” Munro has 2000: Gao Xingjian (France) Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction three times. often explored the theme of girls coming of age in small-town 1999: Gunter Grass (Germany) — AFP In 2009 she removed her collection “Too Much Happiness” Canada - a setting in which she grew up. — Reuters.
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