The honor of 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Canada’s Alice Munro, leaving Korea’s Go Eun and Japan’s Haruki Murakami bitterly disappointed.
The Swedish Academy announced on the 10th that it has selected Alice Munro (82), also known as “Canadian Chekhov,” as the winner of 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the 13th woman since 1903, the 1st Canadian, and also the 1st short story writer to receive the award.
She has written a novel, “Lives of Girls and Women” as well, but most of her works are short stories. She has published around 20 collections of short stories. "She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection,” the committee said. “She is acclaimed for her finely tuned storytelling, which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism.”
Alice Munro, who was born in Ontario, Canada in 1931, released her first short story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow” while studying at the University of Western Ontario. In 1968, she won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize with her first collection of short stories, “Dance of the Happy Shades.” In 1978 and 1986, she won the Governor General’s Award two more times with “Who Do You Think You Are?” and “The Progress of Love” respectively.
Later, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award and O. Henry Award in the US, which brought her global fame. In 2009, she was declared the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the world’s three most prestigious literary honors, for her contribution to fiction, and this year, she was presented with Lifetime Achievement Award by Canadian Booksellers Association.
Meanwhile, not long after her 14th collection of stories, “Dear Life,” she announced that she was putting down her pen. She has written 14 short stories in “Dear Life,” which will hit the shelves next month. It was hailed as “a work that embodies the best of the writer.”
