Alice Munro at a press conference in Dublin, Ireland on June 25, 2009. Photo: CFP

The Swedish Nobel Academy honored Canadian novelist Alice Munro with its literature prize on Thursday, hailing her as a "master of the contemporary short story," and praising her "finely tuned storytelling, which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism. Munro, 82, remains as unassuming and modest as the characters in her collections of short stories and novels.

These are usually women who do not fit the normal stereotype of the beautiful, ravishing heroine, possibly reflecting the puritan values of her childhood.

Low profile

"She is not a socialite. She is actually rarely seen in public, and does not go on book tours," commented American literary critic David Homel.

Born on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, she grew up in the countryside. Her father Robert Eric Laidlaw raised foxes and poultry, while her mother was a small town schoolteacher.

At just 11 years old, she decided she wanted to be a writer, and never wavered in her career choice.

"I think maybe I was successful in doing this because I didn't have any other talents," she explained in an interview posted on YouTube.

Munro's first story The Dimensions of a Shadow was published in 1950 while she was studying at the University of Western Ontario.

Multiple awards

Munro was three times awarded the Governor General's Award for fiction, first for Dance of the Happy Shades published in 1968. Who Do You Think You Are (1978) and The Progress of Love (1986) also won Canada's highest literary honor.

Her short stories often appeared in the pages of prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, with her latest collection Dear Life appearing in 2012.

Her subjects and her writing style, such as a reliance on narration to describe the events in her books, have earned her the moniker "our Chekhov," in reference to the 19th century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov - a term affectionately coined by Russian-American short story writer Cynthia Ozick.

Munro herself has said she writes about the "underbelly of relationships," adding she sets her stories in Canada "because I live life here at a level of irritation which I would not achieve in a place that I knew less well."

"There are no such things as big and little subjects," she has said. "The major things, the evils, that exist in the world have a direct relationship to the evil that exists around a dining room table when people are doing things to each other."

In a 2010 interview, she said she wanted readers "to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens," adding that "long short story fictions do that best" for her as opposed to full-length novels.

After Munro's first marriage ended in divorce in 1972, she took a post as a writer-in-residence at her alma mater in Ontario. Four years later, she remarried, to geographer Gerald Fremlin, and published new works every four years on average.

Munro said earlier this year that she was "probably" not going to write anymore. She insisted in an interview with the New York Times that she meant to retire and said Dear Life would be her last work.

Her story The Bear Came Over the Mountain was adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley as the film Away from Her, and in 2009 she won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for her body of work.

The Booker panel praised her originality and depth.

"Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels," they said.

Not big in China

Though Munro was favored by both Ladbrokes and Unibet, she was not even mentioned in many Chinese media forecast reports before the prize was announced. For most Chinese readers, Munro is an unknown name.

Donald Stone, an English professor at Peking University, says he has never found an English copy of Munro's works in local foreign language bookstores during his 31-year stay in China.

"I have been recommending her books to my friends here for years, but I went from one bookshop to another, and nobody knew her. And obviously, they will," said Stone.

Only one of Munro's books, Runaway, was translated into Chinese and published in 2009. The book sold 50,000 copies, already setting a record for short story collections, according to Li Yao, chief editor for foreign literature at Thinkingdom Media Group Ltd.

"The sales depended on the content itself, as Munro almost had no fixed reader crowd in China before," Li told the Global Times, and commented that Munro's book was very close to readers' hearts, compared with other women writers, such as the 2007 Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing.

"You could make great literature from everyday life and she proves this," said Stone.

In the century-long history of the Nobel prize for literature, only 13 winners were women.

Li explained that short stories are not as popular as long novels in China. And before 2008, there were few companies that imported contemporary foreign short stories. 

Li's company bought the import copyrights of another work by Munro, Dear Life, to China in 2011, and there are plans to release the book to the public this October or November. Thanks to the Nobel prize, Li predicts sales of at least 100,000 copies of the new book.