Hear Ye Hear Ye - Nobel Peace Prize in Literature 2013 Announced

On November 27, 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, giving the largest share of his fortunes to a series of prizes, the Nobel Prizes. As described in Nobel's will, one part was dedicated to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction". 106 Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since 1901.

The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences announced that Canada's Alice Munro - called the "master of the contemporary short story" - won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee compared the 82-year-old author to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian who is considered one of the greatest short story writers in history. Alice Munro's regional stories, set with great detail in Huron County, Ontario, are sometimes chronologically out of order, often ending with ambiguity. Her omniscient narrators, almost always female, experience isolation, alienation, disappointments, and failed mother-daughter relationships. Munro explores the complexity of emotions in even the most ordinary person. The focus is more on Munro's three dimensional, familiar characters than the plot. Female characters are more complicated than males-young girls coming of age and women dealing with the problems of aging.

GPL has an extensive collection of her writings. Begin with Lives of Girls and Women: a Novel, published in 1972. This is her only novel. Continue with her short stories, the first collection being Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories (1973) and then her most recent, Dear Life: Stories, published in 2012. Check out the rest of her descriptive, moving, character-driven stories written in the intervening 39 years. Just the titles alone pique my interest in re-discovering the amazing, newly awarded author, Alice Munro.