Video: Alice Munro opens up about Nobel Prize win and her career in interview with Nobel Media’s Adam Smith
TORONTO — Canadian author Alice Munro, 82, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The committee called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”
Munro was born in a small town about two hours north-west of Toronto to farmer Robert Laidlaw and Anne, a schoolteacher.
She published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950 while studying journalism and English at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
Munro left her studies in 1951 to marry James Munro and the couple moved to Victoria, B.C. where they had four daughters — one of which died shortly after birth.
When the marriage ended in 1972, Munro returned to Ontario. She later married geographer Gerald Fremlin, who died this past April.
Munro currently lives in Victoria.
Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories that have won countless awards and accolades including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, Trillium Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Giller Prize.
She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work.
Sarah Polley’s acclaimed 2006 film Away from Her is an adaptation of Munro’s story The Bear Came Over the Mountain.
“Oh it is a lovely thing when people who don’t seek recognition get it anyway,” Polley tweeted Thursday morning.
In 2009, Munro said she was treated for an unspecified cancer and a heart condition.
Earlier this year, Munro said she is “probably done writing.” She has not yet confirmed whether she will attend a Nov. 2 tribute at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, where she was named winner of a $10,000 prize.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded almost every year since 1901 to an author who produced, as per Alfred Nobel’s will, “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Munro is the 110th Literature Laureate, the 13th woman to be honoured (and the first woman since Herta Muller of Germany in 2009) and the only the second Canadian-born author to receive the Prize. (In 1976, Quebec-born Saul Bellow, who moved to the U.S. as a child, won.)
On Twitter, Margaret Atwood joked she was having trouble reaching Munro to congratulate her. “Alice, come out from behind the tool shed and pick up the phone,” she wrote.
Munro’s publisher Ellen Seligman of McClelland and Stewart said in a statement: “We are overwhelmed with pride and excitement. A momentous day for Canada and Canadian writing, and a thrilling honour in recognition of the extraordinary and enduring talent of Alice Munro, one of the great writers of our time.”
The famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Company tweeted a reaction to Munro’s win on Thursday: “We couldn’t be more thrilled! An extraordinary writer.”
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