Alice Munro ‘so proud’ to see daughter accept her Nobel prize

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Canadian short story master Alice Munro says she was “so proud” to see her daughter Jenny accept the Nobel Prize on her behalf in Stockholm Tuesday.

The 82-year-old literary legend was not well enough to travel to the Swedish capital and watched the proceedings at the home of her daughter Sheila in Victoria.

Jenny Munro received the Nobel Prize for literature at a lavish event attended by Sweden’s royal family.

WATCH:  Alice Munro’s daughter accepts Nobel Prize on mother’s behalf

Alice Munro tells The Canadian Press she thought the ceremony was “marvellous” and was surprised by its extravagance.

“Munro writes about what are usually called ordinary people, but her intelligence, compassion and astonishing power of perception enable her to give their lives a remarkable dignity – indeed redemption – since she shows how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary,” Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Tuesday during a formal ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

ALICE MUNRO TIMELINE:

“The trivial and trite are intertwined with the amazing and unfathomable, but never at the cost of contradiction. If you have never before fantasized about the strangers you see on a bus, you begin doing so after having read Alice Munro.”

READ MORE: Who is Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro?

At Tuesday’s ceremony, Jenny Munro received the Nobel Medal, a diploma and a document confirming the C$1.2 million award.

Wearing a sleeveless, midnight-blue embroidered gown with her blond hair in an updo, Jenny Munro was met with thunderous applause and a standing ovation from the packed theatre as she bowed and accepted the honour from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

READ MORE: Alice Munro says she is ‘probably’ done writing

In a laudatory speech before the literature honour was handed out, Englund called Munro “a virtuoso of the elliptical.”

“It is a challenge to find an unessential word or a superfluous phrase,” he said. “Reading one of her texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between different periods.”

Englund also praised Munro’s ability to convey “the tranquility of the outer world” in her stories, which are set in the small-town southwestern Ontario landscape in which she grew up.

“If you read a lot of Alice Munro’s works carefully, sooner or later, in one of her short stories, you will come face to face with yourself; this is an encounter that always leaves you shaken and often changed, but never crushed.”

Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation, acknowledged the literary treasure at the outset of the ceremony.

“We send our warmest greetings to Alice Munro, who was unable to come to Stockholm. We are glad that Jenny Munro is here to receive the prize on behalf of her mother.”

Raised in the southwestern Ontario farming community of Wingham, Munro is only the 13th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, and the first Canadian-based author to receive it. She is the 110th laureate in literature.

The prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics were also awarded during Tuesday’s ceremony. The peace prize was presented at an earlier event.

The ceremony was to be followed by a lavish dinner at Stockholm City Hall with members of Sweden’s royal family as well as other dignitaries.

Munro has previously won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work, as well as two Scotiabank Giller Prizes (for 1998’s “The Love of a Good Woman” and 2004’s “Runaway”), three Governor General’s Literary Awards (for her 1968 debut “Dance of the Happy Shades,” 1978’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” and 1986’s “The Progress of Love”), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the inaugural Marian Engel Award and the American National Book Critics Circle Award.

Born in 1931 in the southwestern Ontario farming community of Wingham, Munro later moved to Victoria with Jim Munro, with whom she had three children. The couple eventually divorced and Munro moved back to Ontario. She eventually remarried Gerald Fremlin, who died earlier this year.

In a recent interview with The Canadian Press, Englund said that while there is usually some debate over the Nobel literature laureate, Munro has been an unusually popular choice.

Bookstores in the Swedish capital have been displaying Munro’s collections prominently since she was announced as this year’s laureate.

And according to a new study from BookNet Canada, the prize has resulted in a significant spike in sales of Munro’s works, both on home soil and internationally.

Munro has kept an extremely low profile, granting only a handful of interviews since she was announced as the winner.

Regarded as the world’s highest literary honour, the Nobel puts Munro in the company of great wordsmiths including George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T.S. Eliot and Toni Morrison. Canadian-born, American-raised writer Saul Bellow won in 1976.