ALICE MUNRO BORN JULY 10, 1931

The Nobel Prize for literature is known for refusing to bow to the most popular genres or national literatures. It appears to have something of a bias against Americans, even though their novels, like their movies, are influential in every country. It doesn’t necessarily go to writers who are globally known. In venerating short stories, it is doing what it did with Italian performance art and French-Mauritian essays and Swedish poetry; it is taking a stance, defiantly promoting the obscure, the regional and the specialized. Let’s hope this honour, and its attendant celebrity-worship, will bring a vast new audience not just to a Canadian writer but also to an intricate, puzzling and hugely rewarding art form.