Alice Munro winning Man Booker

Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has won this year's Man Booker International Prize on Wednesday beating Mahasweta Devi and a host of other literary heavyweights, including Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul and Mario Vargas Llosa, to win the £60,000(worth USD 95,000) Man Booker International Prize.

The panel, which comprised writers Jane Smiley, Amit Chaudhuri and Andrey Kurkov, praised the 77-year-old for the originality and depth of her work.


Munro, who was born and still lives in Canada, published her first collection of stories, "Dance of the Happy Shades", in 1968, which won Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award.

The Man Booker International Prize is affiliated with the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, but is unique as it can be won by an author of any nationality providing their work is available in English.


The prize, different from the annual Booker Prize for Fiction, is awarded once every two years to a living author for their lifetime achievement.

Previous winners were Ismail Kadaré (2005) and Chinua Achebe (2007).

Ms. Munro (78), regarded as one of Canada’s most celebrated writers.

Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writerin this time.

To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.

The panel of judges, which included Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri, said that to read Ms. Munro’s work was to “learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

She will receive the prize at a ceremony in Dublin on June 25.

Ms. Munro won recognition with her very first collection of stories, ‘Dance of the Happy Shades,’ published in 1968. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s most prestigious literary prize. Her other successful works include ‘Lives of Girls’ and ‘Women’ (1971), which won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award, and ‘The Beggar Maid,’ which was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize in 1980.
Her latest collection of short stories, ‘Too Much Happiness,’ will be published in October.