Alice Munro ‘surprised’ at Nobel Prize for Literature

Canadian writer — and now Nobel prize winner — Alice Munro sets her taut, acutely observed stories in the rural Ontario countryside where she grew up, focusing a stark lens on the frailties of the human condition.

The Swedish Nobel Academy honoured Munro with its literature prize, hailing her as a “master of the contemporary short story,” and praising her “finely tuned storytelling, which is characterised by clarity and psychological realism. Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov.

Munro said she was “just terribly surprised” — and delighted — to learn she had won the Nobel, after being woken by her daughter with the news.