Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for Literature
By CBC News
Former Western University student and honorary degree recipient Alice Munro, D.Litt'76, wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian woman to take the award since its launch in 1901.
Munro, 82, only the 13th woman given the award, is considered one of the world's greatest writers of short stories.
Reached in British Columbia by CBC News on Thursday morning, Munro said she always viewed her chances of winning the Nobel as "one of those pipe dreams" that "might happen, but it probably wouldn't."
Munro's daughter woke her up to tell her the news.
"It's the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course," she told the CBC's Heather Hiscox, MA'87, LLD'11, early Thursday.
Munro called the honour "a splendid thing to happen."
Munro said her husband, Gerald Fremlin, BA'50, a geographer/cartographer who died in April, would have been very happy, and that her previous husband, James Munro, with whom she has three children, and all her family were thrilled.
For complete story, see CBC News.
Reflections on Alice Munro by former classmate and English professor BA'52, MA'58 from a 1969 issue of the Western Alumni Gazette.
