Alice Munro: AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tibn hail the Nobel laureate

'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'

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inShare1 Email AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tibn The Guardian, Friday 11 October 2013 08.00 BST Jump to comments (13)

Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Photograph: Kim Stallknecht

AS Byatt

This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next or what you the reader are going to feel next from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar in some ways ludicrous rhythms of mental life. I belong to a distinguished club of passionate admirers of Munro. We all knew that she is one of the very greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know.

Anne Enright
It is tempting, on reading her stories, to think that Alice Munro is a modest writer and a likable one, but how do we know? She might be steely, fierce, ambitious as hell: she certainly, as five decades of short stories demonstate, knows how to stick to her guns. Besides, "modest" and "likable" are too pious and too small, as words go, to describe Munro's humane presence on the page. She is, as a writer, constantly, thoughtfully there;

able to see her characters in all their faults, and to forgive those faults, or wonder at the possibility of forgiveness. Her narrators are like people you know. They are like you, actually or a heightened, more perceptive version of you the way they think about life, and realise things late, and carry on. Short stories do not make any grandiose claims about truth and society. Munro's work has always posed a larger question about reputation itself; about how we break and remake the literary canon. That question was triumphantly answered by the Nobel prize. If her life's work proves anything, it is that the whole idea of "importance" means very little. Her stories do not ask for our praise, but for our attention. We feel, when we read them, less lonely than we were before.

Colm Tibn
Alice Munro's genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time. Her stories can be shocking and unnerving. I remember a few years ago arriving in Halifax and being told, as though it were hot news, that there was a new story by Munro in a magazine. A friend photocopied it for me and told me not to read it until I was in a comfort zone. This story was "Child's Play", which is forensic in its tone, at ease with cruelty and guilt, and tough, tough, but

yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care.

October 10, 2013

Writers on Munro
Posted by The New Yorker

We asked a number of writers what Alice Munros fiction has meant to them. Heres what they said. Margaret Atwood: As I wrote in my introduction to her Collected Stories:
Through Munros fiction, Sowestos Huron County has joined Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County as a slice of land made legendary by the excellence of the writer who has celebrated it, though in both cases celebrated is not quite the right word. Anatomised might be closer to what goes on in the work of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?

Alice and I have been friends since 1969, when her collection of stories Dance of the Happy Shades and my collection of poems The Circle Game were both published, and I slept on

her floor during a visit to Victoria. A lot of Canadians began with short stories then, because it was so hard to get novels published in Canada in the sixties. We both got our start through Robert Weavers CBC radio show, Anthology. Canadians will be thrilled, Alice will be bowled over, and we will all have a party once she has made her way out of the coat closet, where she has probably gone to hide. Julian Barnes: Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. You are not aware that time is passing, only that it has passedin this, the reader resembles the characters, who also find that time has passed and that their lives have been changed, without their quite understanding how, when, and why. This rare ability partly explains why her short stories have the density and reach of other peoples novels. I have sometimes tried to w ork out how she does it but never succeeded, and I am happy in this failure, because no one else canor should be allowed towrite like the great Alice Munro. Sheila Heti: In this vast country without a vast number of people, there are few (for me, anyway) cultural heroes. Glenn Gould is one of them. Alice Munro is another. I think of them all the time, actually. They represent something similar: consistency, seriousness, an uncompromising attitude, and work that is daunting, single-minded, and perfect. She has always done what she has wanted to, in the way she has wanted to. You look at her and think, Of course, just put all of your intelligence and sensitivity and vitality into your work in a consistent way. There is nothing else. She lives in a small town, has had the same agent since the seventies, doesnt review books or do many interviews. She seems not to waste her time. She just goes straight to what matters most. I dont know when I first read Munro. Probably in school. Certainly her books were always around the house. In Canada, shes just in the atmosphere, like the Queen. At a certain point in my early twenties, I wrote a fan letter to Alice Munro. I dont remember what it said, but I remember how thrilled I was, many months later, to receive a card in the mail with a handwritten thank you in beautiful script, as gracious as anything. She seemed surprised, as though never before had a stranger told her that her stories could mean so much. How alive and unjaded! She must have sent out hundreds, if not thousands, of handwritten cards over the years. It showed me that a writer could be kind and still be a master. One didnt have to play the aloof or superior game. Indeed, the best writers are probably the best because they have a surfeit of love and generosity toward the world, not the reverse. In Canada, you cant make a spectacle of yourself. You have to let other people make a spectacle of you for you. So its moving that the answer to her book Who Do You Think You Are?, published when she was forty-one (and its the question asked of any Canadian person who aspires to anything great) can be, that same number of years later, The winner of the Nobel Prize. Not that this would ever be her answer. But its wonderful that it can be ours. Jhumpa Lahiri: Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does. She taught me that a short story can do anything. She turned the form on its head. She inspired me to probe deeper, to knock down walls. Her work proves that the mystery of human relationships, of human

psychology, remains the essence, the driving force of literature. I am rejoicing at this news. I am thrilled for her; my respect for her is boundless. And I am thrilled for the readers of the world, who will now discover her thanks to this tremendous recognition, and continue to discover her and treasure her into the future. Lorrie Moore: The selection of the brilliant Alice Munro is a thrilling one, a triumph for short-story writers everywhere, who have held her work in awe from its beginning. It is also a triumph for her translators, who have done excellent work in conveying her greatness to those not reading in the English she wrote down. This may have to do with her enduring themes and sturdy if radical narrative architecture, but these qualities seem to have been served well by careful translation. If short stories are about life and novels are about the world, one can see Munros capacious stories as being a little about both: fate and time and love are the things she is most interested in, as well as their unexpected outcomes. She reminds us that love and marriage never become unimportant as storiesthat they remain the very shapers of life, rightly or wrongly. She does not overtly judgeespecially human crueltybut allows human encounters to speak for themselves. She honors mysteriousness and is a neutral beholder before the unpredictable. Her genius is in the strange detail that resurfaces, but it is also in the largeness of vision being brought to bear (and press on) a smaller genre or form that has few such wide-seeing practitioners. She is a short-story writer who is looking over and past every ostensible boundary, and has thus reshaped an idea of narrative brevity and reimagined what a story can do. Joyce Carol Oates: A wonderful writer, whom I first began reading in the nineteen-sixties, when I lived in Ontario, Canada. Alice Munro has always been, among her other attributes, a writers writerit is just a pleasure to read her work. And how encouraging to those of us who love short stories that this master of the realistic, Chekhovian short story is so honored. In a world so frantically politicized and partisan, the achievement of Alice Munro is truly exceptional. Roxana Robinson: Like Chekhov, Alice Munro never sets out to make a political point. She isnt sexist, she has no axe to grind. Shes simply bearing witness to the human experience, reporting from the front lines. Yet she is making a political point, one thats radical because its so enormous and so unsettling. The point is that girls and women, even those who lead narrow and constricted lives, those who wield no influence, who have a limited experience in the world, are just as significant and important as boys and men, those who take drugs, ride across the border, drift down the river, or hunt whales. Womens lives, too, are driven by the great forces that drive all important experience. As it turns out, all those forces are internal: rage, love, jealousy, spite, grief. These are the things that make our lives so wild and dramatic, whether the backdrops are harpoons or swing sets. The great experiences can be set anywhere: a dentists office, a neighbors living room, a country road at night. Its those propulsive, breathtaking, suffocating forces inside us that make those moments so vivid and shocking, its whats inside us that cracks the landscape open, shocking and illuminating like a streak of lightning. She showed us that, Alice Munro. What we all lead are ordinary lives with extraordinary passages. Its Munro wh o reminds us of this, and that the extraordinary is experienced by women as often as by men, and it neednt take place on a whaling ship. Piano teachers, divorced professors, country doctors, solitary

widows in the countryall those small and insignificant people lead lives of enormous drama. Women lead lives of enormous drama. She has made that into fact. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP

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Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Ian Willms for The New York Times

Alice Munro at her home in Clinton, Ontario. Canadians expressed pride over her Nobel honor.

By JULIE BOSMAN Published: October 10, 2013 405 Comments

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
Related

An Appraisal: Master of the Intricacies of the Human Heart (October 11, 2013) A Mighty Honor for a Humble Writer (October 10, 2013) Alice Munro: Excerpts From Her Work (October 10, 2013)

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Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections, was a master of the contemporary short story. She is the 13th woman to win the prize. The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when the Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to comprehend or overtly political. Ms. Munro, widely beloved for her spare and psychologically astute fiction that is deeply revealing of human nature, appeared to be more of a purely literary choice. She

revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place then moving backward or forward in time, and brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural Canada. Her collection Dear Life, published last year, appears to be her last. She told The National Post in Canada this year that she was finished writing, a sentiment she echoed in other interviews. She also seemed to have finished paying attention to major literary awards, if she ever did in the first place. On Thursday morning, the Swedish Academy was unable to locate Ms. Munro before it made the announcement public, according to the Twitter account for the Nobel Prize. A phone message was left instead. Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, eventually found out that she had won while visiting her daughter in Victoria, British Columbia, who woke her at 4 a.m. with the news. Sounding a bit groggy, and at times emotional, she spoke with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation just a few minutes later by telephone. It just seems impossible, she said. It seems just so splendid a thing to happen, I cant describe it. Its more than I can say. She later added, I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel. Waking up to the news that Ms. Munro was the winner, her admirers were jubilant, especially in Canada.

Stephen Harper, the prime minister, issued a statement praising Ms. Munro as the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel in literature. Canadians are enormously proud of this remarkable accomplishment, which is the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant writing, he said. On Twitter, congratulations rolled in from publishers, literary magazines and fellow writers including Margaret Atwood and Nathan Englander. A true master of the form, Salman Rushdie wrote. Readers used Twitter to send messages with Munro quotations. (The constant happiness is curiosity was one favorite.) Some people wondered if Ms. Munros honor was an indication that the short story was entering a golden age; most Nobel winners tend to focus on novels or poems. Ms. Munro knew that she wanted to be a writer from the time that she was a teenager and wrote consistently while she helped her first husband, James Munro, run a bookstore and raise their three daughters. She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her famous, somewhat by accident. For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel, she told The New Yorker in 2012. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published when she was 37.

Throughout her career, she has drawn from the setting of her home of rural Ontario and frequently expanded on themes of sex, desire, work, discontent and aging. One of her collections, The Love of a Good Woman, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. The Nobel, one of the most prestigious and lucrative prizes in the world, is given to a writer for a lifetimes body of work, rather than a single novel, short story or collection. The winner receives eight million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million. Winners in recent years have included Mo Yan of China, in 2012; the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, in 2011; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, in 2010; and, in 2009, Herta Mller, a Romanian-born German novelist and essayist.

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Ian Austen contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2013, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Alice Munro, Storyteller, Wins Nobel in Literature.

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It is interesting that the long struggle of Canadian authors over the last century to find and create a distinctive voice -- supported by small magazines, struggling publishers, occasional bouts of government aid, and just the sheer difficulty of being heard above the American din -should have resulted at long last in this award. That it should not be for the GREAT CANADIAN NOVEL, but for the quiet, brutal short story, the themes of small town Ontario (easily one of the seemingly most boring places in the world), and endless hard work resulting in peerlessly sculpted sentences over 50 years -- that is part of the sheer pleasure in hearing about Alice getting the Nobel. A good day. A day like beating the Russians at hockey.....
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Oct. 10, 2013 at 12:59 p.m. Recommended237

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Kate Toronto

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Ms. Munro is one of the greatest short story writers. I've enjoyed her work since I first read Lives of Girls and Women back in the early 70s.

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