'I don't write out of any decision to be literary': how the Guardian and Observer reported on Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature
• Follow all the reaction on our live blog
The 2013 Nobel Prize for literature has gone to Alice Munro, described by the academy as a 'master of the contemporary short story.'
The author first came to the attention of the Guardian in 1973, when her episodic novel Lives of Girls and Women was published in the UK.
In 1980 Munro was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (then the Booker McConnell). In the event she was pipped to the award by William Golding (who also somewhat controversially beat Anthony Burgess), but the nomination put her on the literary map.
Claire Tomalin, reviewing The Progress of Love in the Observer in 1987, described Munro's work as 'an exploration of those weathers and distances, those landscapes that shift from the known to the almost unimaginable.'
In an Observer interview later that year, Munro told Janet Watts, "I don't write out of any decision to be literary. An enormous amount of faith goes into writing fiction - I mean, why do it at all? It's a celebratory thing to do about human life."
She may not have written with the distinct aim of being 'literary', but in winning the Nobel Prize Munro has been recognised for just that.
0 comments:
Post a Comment