Nobel prize in literature 2013 Winner Alice Munro

Canadian short story Writer Alice Munro won the Nobel literature prize for the year 2013 for her short stories that focus on the frailties of the human condition. The Swedish Academy honored Munro, 82, as a "master of the contemporary short story". The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is the first winner of the $1.2 million prize to be fully identified with Canada. Saul Bellow won it in 1976, but though he was born in Canada, he moved to the U.S. as a boy and is more closely associated with Chicago.

Munro is the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. Her stories are usually set in Ontario, her home province. Among her best-known is “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be put in a nursing home. With her acceptance of the 8m Swedish krona (£775,000) prize she joins a rollcall of 110 past winners including  Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Albert Camus and Rabindranath Tagore. Chinese Author Mo Yan won this award for the year 2012.