Alice Munro wins Man Booker International

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.

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.

In my opinion, Munro is the greatest living English-language writer of short stories. Only William Trevor can come close.

Called the Canadian Chekhov, Munro deserves this award for book after book of sheer delight. Her stories often stray into strange places. My favourite by far is the "Albanian Virgin" although the story "Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage" is a close second. Her plots are often full of surprises, moving effortlessly back and forth in space and time. On occasion when I have tried to relate the plot to a friend, I find I cannot do it. I get tangled. Character and plot are so interwoven, one cannot easily separate them. The story, "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" was made into an excellent movie called "Away from Her."