Alice Munro Wins Nobel Lit. Prize
The top 15 titles on Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list, which represents the books that have seen the largest jumps in sales in the last 24 hours are, of course, by the newly-announced Nobel prize winner in literature, Canadian short-story writer, Alice Munro.
Five of her many titles rose into the top 100 (all published by Knopf):
#8 Dear Life (the hardcover rose to #95), her most recent collection
#14 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
#18 Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
#22 Runaway
#31 Selected Stories
This is the first time since Doris Lessing won in 2007 that the prize winner is an author who writes in English. The New York Times reports, “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.”
Winners in the last six years were:
2012 — Mo Yan, China
2011 — Tomas Transtromer, Sweden
2010 — Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru
2009 — Herta Müller Germany (born Rumania)
2008 — Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Franch
Munro, who is 80, has said that she has retired from writing. Reminded of that in the Nobelprize.org telephone conversation recorded soon after she learned she had won (listen to it here) she opens the door a bit, saying “But this may change my mind.” She also says she hopes this award will bring new recognition to the short story, which is “often brushed off as something people do before they write their first novel.”