Nobel Prize Literature 2013 won Canada's Alice Munro

Nobel Prize Literature 2013 won Canada's Alice Munro

Canada's Alice Munro won the Nobel Literature Prize 2013 for her short stories that focus on the frailties of the human condition. The jury honoured Munro as a 'master of the contemporary short story'.

                             Her stories are often set in small town environments, where the struggle for a socially acceptable existence often results in strained relationships and moral conflicts -- problems that stem from generational differences and colliding life ambitions.

                            She's the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976 and left for the US as a boy. Munro is just the 13th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize since it was first awarded in 1901.

                                Munro's writing has brought her numerous awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for ``Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,'' and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.

                               Often compared to Anton Chekhov, the 82-year-old writer has attained near-canonical status as a thorough, but forgiving, documenter of the human spirit.Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.