Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. The 82-year-old author is the first Canadian writer to win the award— though in the running with fellow Canadian star Leonard Cohen— and the thirteenth woman.
A proponent of the Southern Ontario Gothic sub-genre with the likes of Margaret Atwood and James Reaney, and influenced by Southern American Gothic writers such as Faulkner and O’Connor, the writer is predominantly known for her short stories, which the the Nobel committee called her “a master of.”
Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), the seminal novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and most recently Dear Life (2012) list among the writer’s many works, and the Governor General’s Award, O Henry Award and two Giller Prizes her many accolades.
Now she can add a Nobel Prize, and its 8,000,000 Swedish kronor ($1.3 million Canadian) to the list. A writer whose work focuses on community, those made and in un-making, now joins the ranks of previous prize winners such as Gabriel García Márquez, Seamus Heaney and, fittingly, William Faulkner.
Inspiree of many budding Canadian writers, such as Griffin Prize nominee poet Ian Williams, who wrote his 2010 collection You Know Who You Are in response to Munro’s 1978 novel, the writer says she is above all pleased with the attention this award will draw to Canadian literary endeavour. It is an endeavour she is still very much a part of.
