Alice Munro Prix Nobel 2013

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Alice Munro: AS Byatt, Anne

Enright and Colm Tibnhail the Nobel laureate'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she hasalways seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will

know'

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AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tibn The Guardian, Friday 11 October 2013 08.00 BST Jump to comments (13)

Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Photograph: Kim Stallknecht

AS Byatt


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This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest inthe whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in

the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great asChekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. Shehas done more for the possibilities and the form of the shortstory than any other writer I know. You can never tell whatshe is going to say nextor what you the reader are going tofeel nextfrom line to line. She appears to be in perfectcontrol of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once andshe described how she writes enormously long versions ofstories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely.One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a storywhere a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as aseries of things that have got to be done and are done: "notmuch to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good,

now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to,what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, andthis, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising thesepeculiarin some ways ludicrousrhythms of mental life.

I belong to a distinguished club of passionate admirers ofMunro. We all knew that she is one of the very greatest livingwriters, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Noweveryone will know.

Anne Enright

It is tempting, on reading her stories, to think that Alice Munro

is a modest writer and a likable one, but how do we know?She might be steely, fierce, ambitious as hell: she certainly, asfive decades ofshort stories demonstate, knows how to stickto her guns. Besides, "modest" and "likable" are too pious andtoo small, as words go, to describe Munro's humane presenceon the page. She is, as a writer, constantly, thoughtfully there;


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able to see her characters in all their faults, and to forgivethose faults, or wonder at the possibility of forgiveness. Her

narrators are like people you know. They are like you, actuallyor a heightened, more perceptive version of youthe waythey think about life, and realise things late, and carry on.

Short stories do not make any grandiose claims about truthand society. Munro's work has always posed a larger questionabout reputation itself; about how we break and remake the

literary canon. That question was triumphantly answered bythe Nobel prize. If her life's work proves anything, it is that thewhole idea of "importance" means very little. Her stories donot ask for our praise, but for our attention. We feel, when weread them, less lonely than we were before.

Colm TibnAlice Munro's genius is in the construction of the story. Shehas a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and thecircumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that herworld is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a storysuch as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce

loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motivesand actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I wouldlove to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works,because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing,adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time. Her stories canbe shocking and unnerving. I remember a few years ago

arriving in Halifax and being told, as though it were hot news,that there was a new story by Munro in a magazine. A friendphotocopied it for me and told me not to read it until I was in acomfort zone. This story was "Child's Play", which is forensicin its tone, at ease with cruelty and guilt, and tough, tough, but


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yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, andconstructed with slow Chekhovian care.


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October 10, 2013

Writers on Munro

Posted by The New Yorker

We asked a number of writers what Alice Munros fiction has meant to them. Heres what

they said.

Margaret Atwood:As I wrote in my introduction to her Collected Stories:

Through Munros fiction, Sowestos Huron County has joined Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County as a

slice of land made legendary by the excellence of the writer who has celebrated it, though in both

cases celebrated is not quite the right word. Anatomised might be closer to what goes on in thework of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of

obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the

seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the

nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?

Alice and I have been friends since 1969, when her collection of stories Dance of the HappyShades and my collection of poems The Circle Game were both published, and I slept on


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her floor during a visit to Victoria. A lot of Canadians began with short stories then, because itwas so hard to get novels published in Canada in the sixties. We both got our start throughRobert Weavers CBC radio show, Anthology. Canadians will be thrilled, Alice will be

bowled over, and we will all have a party once she has made her way out of the coat closet,

where she has probably gone to hide.

Julian Barnes:Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. You are notaware that time is passing, only that it has passedin this, the reader resembles thecharacters, who also find that time has passed and that their lives have been changed, withouttheir quite understanding how, when, and why. This rare ability partly explains why her shortstories have the density and reach of other peoples novels. I have sometimes tried to work outhow she does it but never succeeded, and I am happy in this failure, because no one else

canor should be allowed towrite like the great Alice Munro.

Sheila Heti:In this vast country without a vast number of people, there are few (for me, anyway) culturalheroes. Glenn Gould is one of them. Alice Munro is another. I think of them all the time,actually. They represent something similar: consistency, seriousness, an uncompromisingattitude, and work that is daunting, single-minded, and perfect.

She has always done what she has wanted to, in the way she has wanted to. You look at herand think, Of course, just put all of your intelligence and sensitivity and vitality into yourwork in a consistent way. There is nothing else. She lives in a small town, has had the sameagent since the seventies, doesnt review books or do many interviews. She seems not to

waste her time. She just goes straight to what matters most.

I dont know when I first read Munro. Probably in school. Certainly her books were alwaysaround the house. In Canada, shes just in the atmosphere, like the Queen.

At a certain point in my early twenties, I wrote a fan letter to Alice Munro. I dont remember

what it said, but I remember how thrilled I was, many months later, to receive a card in the

mail with a handwritten thank you in beautiful script, as gracious as anything. She seemedsurprised, as though never before had a stranger told her that her stories could mean so much.How alive and unjaded! She must have sent out hundreds, if not thousands, of handwrittencards over the years. It showed me that a writer could be kind and still be a master. One didnt

have to play the aloof or superior game. Indeed, the best writers are probably the best becausethey have a surfeit of love and generosity toward the world, not the reverse.

In Canada, you cant make a spectacle of yourself. You have to let other people make aspectacle of you for you. So its moving that the answer to her book Who Do You Think

You Are?, published when she was forty-one (and its the question asked of any Canadianperson who aspires to anything great) can be, that same number of years later, The winner ofthe Nobel Prize. Not that this would ever be her answer. But its wonderful that it can be

ours.

Jhumpa Lahiri:Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does. She taught me that a shortstory can do anything. She turned the form on its head. She inspired me to probe deeper, toknock down walls. Her work proves that the mystery of human relationships, of human


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psychology, remains the essence, the driving force of literature. I am rejoicing at this news. Iam thrilled for her; my respect for her is boundless. And I am thrilled for the readers of theworld, who will now discover her thanks to this tremendous recognition, and continue todiscover her and treasure her into the future.

Lorrie Moore:The selection of the brilliant Alice Munro is a thrilling one, a triumph for short-story writerseverywhere, who have held her work in awe from its beginning. It is also a triumph for hertranslators, who have done excellent work in conveying her greatness to those not reading inthe English she wrote down. This may have to do with her enduring themes and sturdy ifradical narrative architecture, but these qualities seem to have been served well by carefultranslation. If short stories are about life and novels are about the world, one can see Munros

capacious stories as being a little about both: fate and time and love are the things she is most

interested in, as well as their unexpected outcomes. She reminds us that love and marriagenever become unimportant as storiesthat they remain the very shapers of life, rightly orwrongly. She does not overtly judgeespecially human crueltybut allows humanencounters to speak for themselves. She honors mysteriousness and is a neutral beholderbefore the unpredictable. Her genius is in the strange detail that resurfaces, but it is also in thelargeness of vision being brought to bear (and press on) a smaller genre or form that has fewsuch wide-seeing practitioners. She is a short-story writer who is looking over and past everyostensible boundary, and has thus reshaped an idea of narrative brevity and reimagined what astory can do.

Joyce Carol Oates:A wonderful writer, whom I first began reading in the nineteen-sixties, when I lived inOntario, Canada. Alice Munro has always been, among her other attributes, a writers

writerit is just a pleasure to read her work. And how encouraging to those of us who loveshort stories that this master of the realistic, Chekhovian short story is so honored. In aworld so frantically politicized and partisan, the achievement of Alice Munro is trulyexceptional.

Roxana Robinson:

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro never sets out to make a political point. She isnt sexist, she hasno axe to grind. Shes simply bearing witness to the human experience, reporting from the

front lines. Yet she is making a political point, one thats radical because its so enormous and

so unsettling. The point is that girls and women, even those who lead narrow and constrictedlives, those who wield no influence, who have a limited experience in the world, are just assignificant and important as boys and men, those who take drugs, ride across the border, driftdown the river, or hunt whales. Womens lives, too, are driven by the great forces that drive

all important experience. As it turns out, all those forces are internal: rage, love, jealousy,spite, grief. These are the things that make our lives so wild and dramatic, whether the

backdrops are harpoons or swing sets. The great experiences can be set anywhere: a dentistsoffice, a neighbors living room, a country road at night. Its those propulsive, breathtaking,

suffocating forces inside us that make those moments so vivid and shocking, its whats insideus that cracks the landscape open, shocking and illuminating like a streak of lightning. Sheshowed us that, Alice Munro.

What we all lead are ordinary lives with extraordinary passages. Its Munro who reminds usof this, and that the extraordinary is experienced by women as often as by men, and it neednt

take place on a whaling ship. Piano teachers, divorced professors, country doctors, solitary


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widows in the countryall those small and insignificant people lead lives of enormousdrama. Women lead lives of enormous drama. She has made that into fact.

Photograph: Michael Probst/AP

Advertise on NYTimes.com

Alice Munro Wins NobelPrize in Literature

Ian Willms for The New York Times

Alice Munro at her home in Clinton, Ontario. Canadiansexpressed pride over her Nobel honor.


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By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: October 10, 2013 405 Comments

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whosevisceral work explores the tangled relationships between menand women, small-town existence and the fallibility ofmemory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Related

An Appraisal: Master of the Intricacies of the Human Heart

(October 11, 2013)

A Mighty Honor for a Humble Writer (October 10, 2013)

Alice Munro: Excerpts From Her Work (October 10, 2013)

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Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academysaid that Ms. Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections,was a master of the contemporary short story. She is the

13th woman to win the prize.

The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring ofenthusiasm in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief

from recent years when the Swedish Academy chose winnerswho were obscure, difficult to comprehend or overtly political.

Ms. Munro, widely beloved for her spare and psychologicallyastute fiction that is deeply revealing of human nature,appeared to be more of a purely literary choice. She


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revolutionized the architecture of short stories, oftenbeginning a story in an unexpected place then moving

backward or forward in time, and brought a modesty andsubtle wit to her work that admirers often traced to herbackground growing up in rural Canada.

Her collection Dear Life, published last year, appears to be

her last. She told The National Post in Canada this year thatshe was finished writing, a sentiment she echoed in other

interviews.

She also seemed to have finished paying attention to majorliterary awards, if she ever did in the first place. On Thursdaymorning, the Swedish Academy was unable to locate Ms.Munro before it made the announcement public, according tothe Twitter account for the Nobel Prize. A phone message wasleft instead.

Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario,eventually found out that she had won while visiting herdaughter in Victoria, British Columbia, who woke her at 4a.m. with the news. Sounding a bit groggy, and at times

emotional, she spoke with the Canadian BroadcastingCorporation just a few minutes later by telephone.

It just seems impossible, she said. It seems just so splendid

a thing to happen, I cant describe it. Its more than I can say.

She later added, I would really hope this would make people

see the short story as an important art, not just something youplayed around with until you got a novel.

Waking up to the news that Ms. Munro was the winner, heradmirers were jubilant, especially in Canada.


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Stephen Harper, the prime minister, issued a statementpraising Ms. Munro as the first Canadian woman to win the

Nobel in literature. Canadians are enormously proud of thisremarkable accomplishment, which is the culmination of alifetime of brilliant writing, he said.

On Twitter, congratulations rolled in from publishers, literarymagazines and fellow writers including Margaret Atwood andNathan Englander.

A true master of the form, Salman Rushdie wrote.

Readers used Twitter to send messages with Munroquotations. (The constant happiness is curiosity was onefavorite.) Some people wondered if Ms. Munros honor was

an indication that the short story was entering a golden age;

most Nobel winners tend to focus on novels or poems.

Ms. Munro knew that she wanted to be a writer from the timethat she was a teenager and wrote consistently while shehelped her first husband, James Munro, run a bookstore andraise their three daughters.

She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that wouldmake her famous, somewhat by accident.

For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice,till I got time to write a novel, she told The New Yorker in2012. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I

faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into storieshas been a compensation.

Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was

published when she was 37.


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Throughout her career, she has drawn from the setting of herhome of rural Ontario and frequently expanded on themes of

sex, desire, work, discontent and aging. One of her collections,The Love of a Good Woman, won a National Book CriticsCircle Award in 1998.

The Nobel, one of the most prestigious and lucrative prizes inthe world, is given to a writer for a lifetimes body of work,

rather than a single novel, short story or collection. The

winner receives eight million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2million.

Winners in recent years have included Mo Yan of China, in2012; the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, in 2011; MarioVargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, in 2010; and, in 2009,Herta Mller, a Romanian-born German novelist and essayist.

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Ian Austen contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2013, on

page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Alice Munro,

Storyteller, Wins Nobel in Literature.

405 Comments

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1. o Toronto

o toronto

NYT Pick

It is interesting that the long struggle of Canadian authorsover the last century to find and create a distinctive voice-- supported by small magazines, struggling publishers,occasional bouts of government aid, and just the sheerdifficulty of being heard above the American din --should have resulted at long last in this award. That itshould not be for the GREAT CANADIAN NOVEL, butfor the quiet, brutal short story, the themes of small town

Ontario (easily one of the seemingly most boring placesin the world), and endless hard work resulting inpeerlessly sculpted sentences over 50 years -- that is partof the sheer pleasure in hearing about Alice getting theNobel. A good day. A day like beating the Russians athockey.....

o Oct. 10, 2013 at 12:59 p.m.

o Recommended237

o Kate

o Toronto

NYT Pick

Ms. Munro is one of the greatest short story writers. I'veenjoyed her work since I first read Lives of Girls andWomen back in the early 70s.


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