Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has emerged victorious from a clash of the world's literary giants to win the £60,000 Man Booker International prize.
The 77-year-old writer, whose win places her still higher on her ascent to what fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood last year described as an elevation to "international literary sainthood", was picked from a line-up of towering international talent that pitted Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa against the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Australia's Peter Carey and the UK's contender, the Booker prize-winning Scottish author James Kelman. Judge Jane Smiley, the
Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, admitted that selecting a winner from the 14 longlisted authors – who are assessed on their bodies of work and the contribution they have made to "fiction on the world stage" – had been a challenge, but that Munro "just won us over".
"Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise," said Smiley. "Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated."
Munro's spare, quiet stories of small-town life have won her a host of literary awards, although the Nobel prize for literature, for which she is a perennial contender, still eludes her. But she has nonetheless spoken of her desire to write a great novel. "I'm always trying. Between every book I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff," she told the Guardian in 2003. But Smiley said that Munro managed to do more in the 30 pages of her short stories than some novelists do in an entire book.
"Her commitment to the story as a form is very impressive. Lesser writers would have produces a good or mediocre novel, or three or four, over the years. The fact she decided this is what she was going to explore is very impressive, especially in the Anglo writing world, which is inimical to the shorter form," agreed Smiley's fellow judge, the novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. "She's wonderful – the way she brings in memory, the way she handles language and narrative …The level of craftsmanship involved demands attention."
Munro's short story collections, from her acclaimed debut in 1968 with Dance of the Happy Shades and its masterful handling of adolescent preoccupations to 2006's fictionalised family history The View from Castle Rock, have generally focused on small-town life in rural Ontario. On this apparently narrow canvas, with its finely calibrated social nuances, Munro paints a profoundly resonant human comedy taking in all the grand themes of love, life and death.
"Although her style seems simple, sinuous, easy to read, she's thought about each subject so much that you feel like you've had a real immersion in a particular subject," said Smiley, pointing to her story The Turkey Season, about a girl gutting turkeys in a factory. "It gives you such a sense of everything about that turkey factory – where it is, what she's doing, the social groups. That depth is what you'd usually expect to get in a novel, but Alice Munro gives us it in 20 to 30 pages."
Munro is the third recipient of the £60,000 Man Booker International prize, following Ismail Kadare in 2005 (when she was shortlisted for the first time) and Chinua Achebe in 2007. The author said she was "totally amazed and delighted" to win the award, which will be presented to her on 25 June at Trinity College in Dublin.
Now living in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, Munro is the author of 11 short story collections, and one "novel", Lives of Girls and Women – which is generally agreed to be more accurately described as a series of linked short stories.
A Conversation with Alice Munro
| This Vintage Books website features an interview with Alice Munro. |
Alice Munro
| Search for reviews of books written by Alice Munro, Canada’s quintessential short story writer. From McClelland and Stewart Ltd. |
Alice Munro
| A biography of Alice Munro and a chronology of her works. A British Council website. |
Historica: Alice Munro
| Listen to a dramatization of “How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro. A Historica Radio Minute. |
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Stories
| Read this online excerpt from one of Alice Munro’s short stories. A WYNC website. |
From The Canadian Encyclopedia
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