Canadian author Alice Munro is the recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature — and the rare author to be acknowledged for short stories. She has been honored previously with the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, and she is a three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction. Often popularly referred to as “our Chekov,” the focus of Munro’s fiction is her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.
“Among writers, her name is spoken in hushed tones,” fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood once wrote. “She’s the kind of writer about whom it is often said — no matter how well known she becomes — that she ought to be better known.”
