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| Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for Literature | Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for Literature |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. | Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story". | Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story". |
| The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. | |
| Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway. | |
| Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000). | |
| Last year's recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan. | Last year's recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan. |
| Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950. | |
| She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time. | |
| Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Munro's first collection, and it went on to win Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award. | |
| In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work. | |
| BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said Monro had been "at the very top of her game since she started". | |
| "Very few writers are her equal," he said, adding "she gets to the heart of what it is to be human". | |
| "I thought she might not win because she's not overtly political; and of late the Nobel has tended to go to political writers." | |
| The win "probably won't make a commercial difference" to the author, he added, but it "makes a huge difference to how her work will be viewed in historical terms". | |
| "If she hadn't won it before she died, I think it would have been a terrible, terrible omission." | |
| Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976. | |
| Often compared to Anton Chekhov, she is known for writing about the human spirit and a regular theme of her work is the dilemma faced by young girls growing up and coming to terms with living in a small town. | |
| Her early stories capture the difference between her own experiences growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s. | |
| In an interview in 2003, she described the 1960s as "wonderful". | |
| It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said. | |
| Her writing has brought her several awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize and The Commonwealth Writers' Prize. | |
| In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review. |