Munro honored

It was great to know that Canadian author Alice Munro, 82, won 2013 Nobel Prize in literature.
She is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the prestigious award.
The focus of Munro’s fiction is her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her accessible, moving stories explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro’s writing has established her as “one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction,” or, as Cynthia Ozik puts it, our Chekhov.” Munro published her first collection of stories — Dance of the Happy Shades — in 1968 and her 14th, Dear Life, in 2012. Over those 45 years, the “Canadian Chekhov” has won both critical reverence and the loyalty of fans across the world for stories that can encapsulate a life within a dozen pages, and for a tender but unsparing gaze on the ordinary events that assume giant dimensions in all our lives. Munro is also the recipient of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize and a three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction. She underwent heart surgery in 2001 but the new millennium ushered in some of her boldest and frankest work, in collections such as Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. After her husband’s death this April, she announced that Dear Life would be her final book. — Anees Lokhande, Alkhobar