Canada's Alice Munro wins Nobel prize for literature

Canadian writer Alice Munro has won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, which selects Nobel literature winners, called her a “master of the contemporary short story”. Last year’s award went to Mo Yan of China. [caption id=“attachment_1164595” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AP[/caption] The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday. Munro’s books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades. Here are some facts about Munro. https://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org/status/388261790129213440 https://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org/status/388261648588210176 https://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org/status/388258838744297472 Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories since the 1960s, often focusing on the lives of girls and women from the towns and farming communities in her home region of southwestern Ontario. She has been compared to Anton Chekhov for her exploration of the submerged passions and dramas in quiet provincial lives. The Nobel academy hailed “her finely tuned storytelling, which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism.” Munro is the only Canadian winner of the literature prize, apart from Canada-born US novelist Saul Bellow. She is the first woman to win since Herta Mueller in 2009 and the 13th female literature recipient since the prize was founded in 1901. She is also one of the few literature laureates to write almost exclusively in the short story form. With inputs from AP