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STOCKHOLM/TORONTO. — Canadian Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story.”

“Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov,” the Swedish Academy said, comparing her to the 19th century Russian short story writer in a statement on its website.

Munro, reached by CBC Television in Victoria, British Columbia, said she hoped the award “would make people see the short story as an important art; not just something you played around with until you get a novel written.”

The 82-year-old, who revealed in 2009 that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and been treated for cancer, said, however, that she did not think winning the prize would change her decision announced early this year to stop writing.

“You know, I was always thrilled at whatever came along — like if I got published, I was thrilled. I still am, in a way,” she told the CBC in a phone interview.

Munro, who was awarded the prize of 8 million crowns (US$1,25 million) by the committee, said her daughter woke her up to give her the news.

“It just seems impossible. It seems so splendid a thing to happen, I can’t describe it. It’s more than I can say.”
The short story, a style more popular in the 19th and early 20th century, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular tastes. Short stories tend to be set in a more concentrated time frame with a more limited number of characters. Munro’s merit, in the eyes of her admirers, was to introduce into her stories a richness of plot and depth of detail usually more characteristic of novels.

The characters in her stories are often girls and women with seemingly unexceptional lives, who struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging.

“This is someone who’s not setting her stories in a dramatic place, a dramatic landscape,” her long-time editor and publisher Douglas Gibson said in a CBC interview.

“Suddenly you find yourself being fascinated by the life of this chambermaid, or this bean farmer, or this Vancouver housewife. Again, these are ordinary people, ordinary stories, but she has the magic.”

Given that Munro has long been suggested as a candidate for the award, Gibson said he got up early and dressed just in case.
“It was a little bit like Christmas Eve. I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep, because  — would Santa come? And Santa came,” he said.

The award triggered an outpouring of pride in Canada, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeting his congratulations. — Reuters.