In ’08 I got to publish memoir by #AliceMunro‘s daughter Sheila, Lives of Mothers&Daughters. She told Mom abt Nobel. pic.twitter.com/JJNWilzaPr

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) October 10, 2013

 

In ’99 Canadian Consul General in NYC Pamela Wallin feted #AliceMunro. I was one of the NY editors at the swell event. She charmed us all.

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) October 10, 2013

 

Great news for all readers that Alice Munro was named this morning as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As the tweets above chronicle, I’ve had a glancing professional acquaintanceship with Munro over the years. She is the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel,* and only the 13th women to receive it, among 110 total laureates. As a reader, I’ve also savored her work. Amid all the excited coverage this morning, I found this great quote in a Canadian Press article spoken by her some time ago:

I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way–what happens to somebody–but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing–not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Here are copies of two editions of Munro’s work from my own library.

*I read a NY Times blog post by Adam Sternbergh later today reminding readers that Saul Bellow–Nobel Laureate in 1976–was born in Montreal, so he might qualify as the first Canadian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. And yet, he grew up in Chicago and more strongly identified with the US, and was often described as “the Canadian-born American writer.” Sternbergh concludes, “With Munro, however, there are no…caveats. There is no need for any asterisk.”