The “Canadian Chekhov”, Alice Munro, has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy called the author of 14 story collections, numerous essays and compilations a “master of the contemporary short story”, before announcing the eight million kroner (£770,000) prize. Munro is the 13th woman to be presented with the award and the 1st Canadian – apart from Saul Bellow, who lived most of his life in the US. She also won the Man International Prize – not to be confused with the Man Booker Prize, despite newly overlapping criteria – for “continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage” in 2009.
It has not yet been confirmed whether Munro has received the news. Winners are traditionally notified by phone in the hour before the announcement (a formal presentation occurs – where possible – some time after), but the Academy were unable to locate her so left a phone message instead.
Munro has long been considered a “writer’s writer”. Her stories deal with small-town life in and around the Great Lakes, and themes of gender, memory and missed opportunities, though they are best described as “long short stories” given that they often exceed the traditional structure of the short story both in narrative time (her stories are frequently non-linear) and word count. Not everyone is a fan. Munro is repeatedly praised for glorifying “decent, ordinary lives”, but as Christian Lorentzen was keen to stress in the LRB: “Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort.”
Lorentzen may need to go into hiding. The NS‘s lead fiction critic, Leo Robson, sees the arrangement of her stories as sometimes problematic, but had the following to say about her style: “Munro, though her one-time under-appreciation has now been over-corrected, is an astute and lavishly confident writer, her clean, well-shaped sentences delivering a near-constant supply of stinging insight, together with moments of wonderful soft-fingered grace. Her economy with words can be dazzling: ‘you couldn’t call it rape, she too was determined'”.
Dear Life, Munro’s most recent collection, closes with four brief sketches she describes as “the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.” The 82-year old Munro resides on a farm close to Clinton, Ontario, where she and her husband Gerald Fremlin lived until Fremlin’s death in April this year.
Shortly after, Munro announced that Dear Life would be her final collection and that she had retired from the writing life.
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