Canada's Munro wins international Booker prize

Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Man Booker International Prize, an award
honouring her lifetime of work.

The nearly $103,000 prize, which is awarded every two years, honours a living
fiction author writing in English, or whose work is widely translated into
English.

"Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much
depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime
of novels," the three-judge panel said in a statement.

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

This year marks the third edition of the young prize, which was founded in 2004
and has been awarded to Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare of Albania.

Authors E.L. Doctorow, V.S Naipaul and Joyce Carol Oates were also among this
year's finalists.

Munro, 77, is among the most accomplished writers on the Canadian literature
scene and the author behind short story collections such as Lives of Girls and
Women, The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage. She was also nominated for the international Booker in 2007.

Munro, who is originally from the small southwestern Ontario community of
Wingham, has garnered praise for her tales of women living in small towns.

She is a multiple winner of both the Governor General's Literary Awards and the
Giller Prize.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2009/05/26/munro-booker.html