Not bad for a former “Victoria housewife.”
Today at 7:30 a.m. PST, Alice Munro’s daughter accepts the Nobel Prize for literature on behalf of the 82-year-old Victoria writer, who is too frail to attend the ceremony.
Jenny Munro is in Stockholm, Sweden, for the event, with her husband, Dave Connelly.
“It’s a very impressive and formal ceremony. It’s white tails for the men and ball gowns for the women,” said Victoria bookseller Jim Munro, Alice Munro’s former husband and Jenny’s father.
Nobel Prize laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and $1.3 million. The prize recognizes the entire body of work created by Munro, an internationally lauded writer specializing in short stories.
Munro said in an interview she regards the prize as a “vindication” of the short-fiction form.
“You go for a long time with writing, just wondering what you’re doing and how it’s working and things like that. You love finding out it’s worked well,” she said in a podcast posted on the Nobel Prize website.
Munro said the weeks following the October announcement have been “bewildering but very, very pleasant.”
She added: “It’s wonderful … not necessarily the fact of me getting it as much as the whole thing.”
Alice Munro spoke from the Victoria home of her other daughter, Sheila, with whom she now lives. Jim Munro said the writer, who previously lived in Ontario, will make this city her permanent home.
The owner of Munro’s Books previously explained Munro’s health is too delicate to withstand the transatlantic flight and a round of Nobel Prize events such as dinners, press conferences and concerts.
“She’s not well enough to go,” Jim Munro said. “She’s happy. She’s not bed-ridden or anything, just too fragile to take such a trip.”
Alice Munro began writing as a young mother living in Victoria. In 1969 she was interviewed by the Daily Colonist after she won a Governor General’s Award for her first short-story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.
“I’m terrifically happy,” she told a reporter who described her as a “Victoria housewife.”
