It includes a coda to the four final stories: "I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life." When her long-term Canadian editor, Douglas Gibson, received her 2012 collection, Dear Life, he says she told him this would be her last book and he felt that she meant it this time. In July this year she formally announced her retirement (although a brief broadcast on Canadian television after the Nobel announcement teasingly hinted she might be tempted to write again). She may not have kept her resolution not to write again, but she has for the most part, even in the post-Nobel commotion, kept her promise not to do any more publicity. "How much of my life have I spent going along this road, what else could I have been doing, and how much energy have I been taking from other things? It is very weird to think this now, because my children are older they don't need me around, and yet I feel somehow that I've only lived one part of this life and there's another part that I haven't lived." Two or three years from now, I will be too old, I will be too tired," Munro said when I interviewed her after the publication of The View from Castle Rock in 2006. "We had to wait more than a century, but we finally have a Nobel for a pure short-story writer," says Franzen. She is the 13th woman and the second Canadian (if you count Saul Bellow, who emigrated when he was nine) to have been awarded the prize. Her daughter Jenny will travel to Sweden to attend the ceremony on her behalf because Munro, now 82, is not well enough to make the journey herself. After years of consternation as to "why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame", as Franzen put it in an impassioned piece in the New York Times in 2004, this week her followers can finally be satisfied: Munro is Nobel Laureate for Literature. After receiving the Nobel Prize, it is probably the last thing she can say about herself.T o say that Alice Munro inspires devotion among her readers is more than cliche: for Jonathan Franzen she is "the Great One", for Margaret Atwood "an international literary saint", for the New Yorker magazine, where her stories have appeared since the 1970s, she is "our blessing". Munro mentioned that it was nice to feel just like everyone else again. It is somewhat amusing because, when she spoke about her retirement, Ms. Comparisons with Chekhov come from the fact that the themes she touches upon are to a great degree similar to his – namely, the juxtaposition of quiet, uneventful life in provincial regions and hidden passions, dramas and heated conflicts.Īnother interesting point is that earlier this year Alice Munro announced that she was no longer going to write fiction, explaining this by saying that she doesn’t have the energy she needs for it anymore. Since she started writing she published more than a dozen collections of short stories, usually choosing to write about the things she knew best – the lives of girls and women from her home region of southwestern Ontario. She has been writing short stories since 1950, and since then has been often praised for her fresh, witty and independent writing style. She even said after receiving the award that she hopes it will help people see the short story as an important literary genre, not just something you play with until you have a novel published. She is unusual in yet another respect – unlike the majority of Nobel Prize winners (and, in fact, the majority of writers in general), she almost exclusively writes in the short story form – not a trivial fit in a literary world, where it is extremely hard to make oneself noticeable unless you write novels or plays. Alice Munro is also the 13 th woman to be honored with this award.
He, however, was only born in Canada but was raised in the United States, so it is more correct to call him an American writer rather than a Canadian one.
It is interesting to mention that she is the first Canadian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for the entire duration of its existence (it was established in 1901), with a probable exception of Saul Bellow who won it in 1976. Her name appears in the news not for the first time – she already received the Man Booker International Prize for her literary work, and her style is often compared to that of another master of short story – Chekhov. This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.
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