Alice Munro,
the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores
the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence
and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on
Thursday.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms.
Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections, was a “master of the
contemporary short story.” She is the 13th woman to win the prize.
The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm
in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when
the Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to
comprehend or overtly political.
Ms. Munro, widely beloved for her spare and psychologically astute
fiction that is deeply revealing of human nature, appeared to be more of
a purely literary choice. She revolutionized the architecture of short
stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place then moving
backward or forward in time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her
work that admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural
Canada, which served as the location for many of her stories.
Her collection “Dear Life,” published last year, appears to be her last.
She told The National Post in Canada this year that she was finished
writing, a sentiment she echoed in other interviews.
She also seemed to have finished paying attention to major literary
awards, if she ever did in the first place. On Thursday morning, the
Swedish Academy was unable to locate Ms. Munro before it made the
announcement public, according to the Twitter account for the Nobel Prize. A phone message was left instead.
Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, eventually found out
that she had won while visiting her daughter in Victoria, British
Columbia, who woke her at 4 a.m. with the news. Sounding a bit groggy,
and at times emotional, she spoke with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation just a few minutes later by telephone.
“It just seems impossible,” she said. “It seems just so splendid a thing
to happen, I can’t describe it. It’s more than I can say.”
She later added, “I would really hope this would make people see the
short story as an important art, not just something you played around
with until you got a novel.”
Waking up to the news that Ms. Munro was the winner, her admirers were jubilant, especially in Canada.
Stephen Harper, the prime minister, issued a statement praising Ms.
Munro as the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel in literature.
“Canadians are enormously proud of this remarkable accomplishment, which
is the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant writing,” he said.
On Twitter, congratulations rolled in from publishers, literary
magazines and fellow writers including Margaret Atwood and Nathan
Englander.
“A true master of the form,” Salman Rushdie wrote.
Readers used Twitter to send messages with Munro quotations. (“The
constant happiness is curiosity” was one favorite.) Some people wondered
if Ms. Munro’s honor was an indication that the short story was
entering a golden age; most Nobel winners tend to focus on novels or
poems.
“I’m walking on air,” said Douglas Gibson, who began publishing Ms.
Munro’s books in 1978 after he talked her out of an attempt at a novel.
“I know that me and my immediate friends are punching the air in
delight.”
Ms. Munro knew that she wanted to be a writer from the time that she was
a teenager and wrote consistently while she helped her first husband,
James Munro, run a bookstore and raise their three daughters.
She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her famous, somewhat by accident.
“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker
in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced
that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a
compensation.”
Her first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published when she was 37.
Throughout her career, she has drawn from the setting of her home of
rural Ontario and frequently expanded on themes of sex, desire, work,
discontent and aging. One of her collections, “The Love of a Good
Woman,” won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998.
