Alice Munro became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her daughter woke her in the middle of the night to deliver the startling news.
“I had forgotten about it all, of course,” Munro told CBC News early on Thursday morning. “It just seems impossible. A splendid thing to happen … More than I can say.”
Munro, 82, is known as Canada’s Anton Chekhov. Chekhov was a Russian author who excelled at writing short stories, a literary legend of the form.
“My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” Munro told the Canadian news service. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”
The new Nobel Prize winner will soon have more books in circulation, according to Publishers Weekly.
“Vintage will be reprinting 100,000 copies of Munro backlist,” the industry publication tweeted, “which includes 14 story collections. All reprints will have a Nobel seal.”
Neil Sagebiel 