Alice Munro Won Me Over

Hardcore Alice Munro fans have been lobbying so long for the Canadian short-story master to win the Nobel Prize in Literature that the fact she’s actually won it seems a bit unreal. The Swedish Academy is, after all, famously resistant to such campaigns. Given that the academy also seems to prefer writers of a political — if not outright dissident — bent, Munro’s nabbing of the honor has become another link in the long chain of improbabilities that has been her brilliant career. To write at all, she once explained to the Paris Review, was difficult for a woman who married young, promptly became a mother and also worked shifts in the bookstore she owned with her husband. Then there’s the fact that Munro is a Canadian woman who writes short stories, three traits that virtually repel public interest, and certainly appeared unlikely to win her international fame and reverence.