VANCOUVER – Humbled to become the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro wants to share the limelight with the medium she’s acclaimed for.
“This is a wonderful thing for me. It’s a wonderful thing for the short story,” she said to Nobel Media’s Adam Smith in a phone interview Thursday.
Munro, who has written more than a dozen collections of short fiction over her multi-decade career, said she heard the news when reporters called her early Thursday morning after the Nobel Committee announced the win in Oslo.
“You always think that your latest work is your best – at least I do,” Munro said in regards to which of her tomes would be a good starting point for new readers.
READ MORE: Who is Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro?
In fact, her 2012 book Dear Life was to be her last published work.
She told the National Post in June she “probably wasn’t going to write anymore.”
“This may change my mind,” Munro said Thursday.
“That’s an exciting statement. That’s going to have everybody buzzing,” Smith told the 82-year-old, who is only the 13th woman out of more than 100 writers to be awarded the prize.
While the win took Munro by surprise, long-time publisher Douglas Gibson admits he didn’t sleep very well the night before.
“We’d heard rumours, so you hope,” he said. “I was kind of like a kid on Christmas Eve. I didn’t sleep too well because you never know. And then Santa Claus came.”
“It means suddenly, in this case, Canadians can say ‘Wow! We won a gold medal. We have one of the best authors in the whole world,'” Gibson said. “And, it’s Alice Munro.”
WATCH: Douglas Gibson talks about his almost 40-year working relationship with Alice Munro and why she is so deserving of the honour
He said Munro is very modest and her reaction to the win brought “others in to share the spotlight.”
“One of the things that she said in her statement is… ‘I’m very happy about this. I’m happy that it’s going to make Canadians happy and, I hope that it will draw attention to Canadian writing in general.'”
“That’s very typical of Alice,” Gibson said.
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