LONDON - Alice Munro, one of Canada's most celebrated writers, known for stories of small-town life, won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement on Tuesday.
The prize is awarded every two years to a living author whose work has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.
"I am totally amazed and delighted," Munro told Man Booker Prize officials after receiving news of her win.
One of the world's most renowned short-story writers and the winner of numerous literary awards, Munro has lived in and spent much of her career writing about the lives of women in smalltown Canada. She has made an artform out of the ordinary.
"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before," the judging panel that included author Jane Smiley, writer Amit Chaudhuri and essayist Andrey Kurkov, said in a news release.
Munro has been recognized over and over for her short-story collections -- three Libris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers Association, Governor Generals awards, top fiction prize from the National Book Circle in New York for "The Love of a Good Woman", and in 1998, she won the Giller Prize for the same collection.
Her first collection of short stories, "Dance of the Happy Shades" (1968), won the Governor General's Literary Award as did her 1978 collection "Who Do You Think You Are?"
She's also won the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S.
Her themes have evolved over the years, initially focusing on the trials and tribulations of adolescent girls growing up in small Ontario towns and more recently looking at the problems of middle age.
Munro has said: "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."
Munro was nominated for Britain's Booker Prize and in 1977 became the first Canadian to win the Canada-Australia Literary Prize.
Her latest collection of short stories, "Too Much Happiness," will be published in October 2009.
The 77-year-old author was born in the southwestern Ontario farming community of Wingham and later moved to Victoria, B.C., with her first husband, with whom she had three children.
The couple divorced and Munro moved back to Ontario where she eventually remarried.
She will receive the prize of C$105,000 and a trophy at an award ceremony on June 25 at Trinity College, Dublin.
Munro is the third winner of the international award beating out Peter Carey and James Kelman who have won the Man Booker prize for fiction.
Previous winners of the Booker international prize, presented every two years, include Albania's Ismail Kadare and Nigerian Chinua Achebe.
The better known Man Booker prize is awarded annually for novels in English by writers from Britain, Ireland or Commonwealth countries.
