As Teleread’s Canadian correspondent, I am delighted to share the news with our readers that Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the 13th woman to win, and the first Canadian woman.
Munro is known for her short stories, and her collections, chronicling the everyday life of rural women, have won international acclaim. She is widely read in Canada as a popular literary author, and her most recent collection was published in 2012.
My personal Alice Munro story? Well, every Literature major I have known has one book in their degree which was a whack-a-mole: it just kept popping up. Mine was [easyazon-link asin=”B006F1YOFA” locale=”us”]Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)[/easyazon-link] by Alice Munro. Considered Munro’s only ‘novel,’ it was a series of linked short stories all featuring the same main character. I read in in the first-year survey course (they liked to pick Canadian authors for that one in case it was the only English you ever took) and then again in Post-Colonial Authors (second year) and Selected Women Writers (third year). It was a good book, but perhaps not three courses worth of good!
Cheers to Munro for her well-deserved win. As a plus, her books are widely available, in ebook and otherwise, at Kobo and Amazon.
May now Canadians will be able to buy in ebook format Dance of the Happy Shades and Something I’ve been Meaning to tell You. No idea why they aren’t available now.
Fantastic writer indeed.
I probably read a few Alice Munro stories back in college umpteen years ago, but I have no clear memory of them. But there were lots I had to read and it was a long time ago. It’s shocking to think she is the only Canadian to win the Literature Prize. Margaret Atwood would have been the obvious choice for Canadian women authors, but Sweden seems to eschew the obvious a lot of the time and in the long run that probably a good thing.
@Greg M. So sorry. It seems our Spam filter took exception to you this week. I just dug out four of your comments. I hope I didn’t miss any. If I did, it wasn’t intentional.
Atwood is no Munro. The Academy made the right decision.