Alice Munro, an author renowned for her short stories, was named the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 82-year-old writer is just the 13th woman to win the prize.
Munro has been praised for her accessible, best-selling works, which are mostly set in Ontario, notes USA Today. The Swedish Academy, which has been handing out the award since 1901, called Munro a “master of the contemporary short story.”
In order to meet the expected rise in demand for her short story collections, Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, told the Wall Street Journal that they will start publishing new editions as soon as possible. “Alice is richly deserving of the Nobel Prize. Every year we've been secretly hoping she'd win,” a Knopf spokesman said.
The Swedish Academy’s Permanent Secretary Peter Englund said Murno is “a fantastic portrayer of human beings” in an interview on the Nobel Prize site. Englund added, “One of my personal favorites is a book that came out in 2006, which is called 'The View from Castle Rock.”
Earlier this year, Munro said that she plans on retiring after her 14th collection, Dear Life, was published.
An American has not won the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. The prize is worth $1.2 million and honors an author's entire body of work.
image: Amazon