1ST CANADIAN WOMAN TO WIN NOBEL PRIZE

Alice Munro 82, wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian woman to take the award since its launch in 1901.  
Munro, among the only 13th woman given the award, is considered one of the world's greatest writers of short stories.
Reached in British Columbia by CBC News on Thursday morning, Munro said she always viewed her chances of winning the Nobel as "one of those pipe dreams" that "might happen, but it probably wouldn't."
Munro's daughter woke her up to tell her the news. 
"It's the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course," she told the CBC's Heather Hiscox early Thursday. Munro called the honour "a splendid thing to happen." 

Munro said her husband, Gerald Fremlin, a geographer/cartographer who died in April, would have been very happy, and that her previous husband, James Munro, with whom she has three children, and all her family were thrilled.

• Born in Ontario in 1931, Alice Munro later moved to Victoria with her first husband, but returned to Ontario following their divorce.
• Three years ago, in an interview at Toronto's International Festival of Authors, Munro revealed she had battled cancer, but did not provide specifics.
• In June, she told the National Post she was "probably not going to write anymore."

Asked by Hiscox whether she would reconsider that statement, Munro said she didn't think so, "because I am getting rather old." 

Munro, originally from Wingham in southwestern Ontario, has been called Canada's Chekhov. Similar to the work of the Russian short-story master, plot is usually secondary. 

Her stories revolve around small epiphanies encountered by her characters, often when current events illuminate something that happened in the past.Munro is beloved by readers around the world for her striking portraits of women living in small-town Ontario.

Source: CBC...More