Canada’s ‘master of short story’ wins Nobel literature award
Print Edition
Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving documenter of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy said yesterday.
Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious US$1.2 million award since Saul Bellow, who left for the US as a boy and won in 1976.
Seen as a modern Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters.
She is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” and is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s prize, Canada’s highest literary honor.
“I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win,” Munro said.
The award is likely to be the capstone to her career. Munro told Canada’s National Post in June that she was “probably not going to write anymore.”
The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, said: “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.”
Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro’s youth in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.
She described the ‘60s as “wonderful.” It was “because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” she said.
Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion.
“It was glory I was after ... walking the streets like an exile or a spy,” recalls the narrator of Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women,” a novel published in 1971.
She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada. She dropped out of college to marry fellow student James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence.
Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” came out in 1968 and won the Governor’s prize.
She later married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer.
Among her best known stories is “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story of a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a nursing home.
Some have called her “the greatest author in North America and yes I tend to agree with that,” said the academy’s Englund. “We’re not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages, more than an average novel writer can, but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades and it works.”
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