For Alice Munro’s ex-husband, it was a most unexpected birthday surprise. Bookseller Jim Munro turned 84 on Thursday. In the morning, he learned Alice Munro had won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature.
Delighted by the news, he chatted with his former wife (with whom he’s on friendly terms) about her win.
“Alice didn’t know. She didn’t even know she was on a short list or anything. I don’t know if the Nobel has a short list. But she’d forgotten she was in the running,” he said.
Munro, 82, is the first Canadian woman to win a Nobel Prize for literature. The celebrated short-story writer, contacted in Victoria, told the CBC she’d always imagined winning the Nobel Prize was “one of those pipe dreams” that “might happen, but probably wouldn’t.”
Born and raised in Wingham, Ont., Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ont., and Comox. She’s previously won the Man Booker International Prize, three Governor General’s literary awards and two Giller prizes.
Alice Munro (formerly Laidlaw) married Jim Munro in 1951. The couple, who divorced in 1972, founded Munro’s Books, originally located on Yates Street in 1963.
Jim said Alice, who worked part-time in the store, became truly serious about writing after reading some of the bookstore’s less distinguished offerings.
“She said, ‘What am I doing selling these crappy books?’ ” he told the Times Colonist recently.
Victoria novelist Jack Hodgins, a friend of Munro’s, expressed delight over her Nobel Prize win.
Hodgins said he first met Munro shortly after her first short story collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) won the Governor General’s award. He invited her to speak to his English students at a Nanaimo high school.
“She drove up and she spent an hour or so behind my desk, answering questions. They were totally charmed by her, as I was.”
Hodgins, who has visited Munro several times in Comox, said her writing has an ineffable quality that is difficult to describe.
“She seems to have an incredible ability to see into the hearts and minds and feeling of other people,” he said.
“I’d hoped this [Nobel Prize win] would happen. If it was going to happen to any Canadian writer, I thought she was the best possibility.”
Another old friend, Victoria artist Pat Martin Bates, recalled first meeting Munro in the mid-1960s.
“Alice used to be part of the crowd of artists here, she was great . .. She was very fiery as a matter of fact. Her hair was all crinkly, standing up on end, practically.”
In those early days, Bates remembers Munro writing on the kitchen table at her Rockland home with her young children “underneath the table, practically.”
“She was always confident, to my mind. She knew what she was doing. She knew what she wanted to do. She had all these stories in her and she wanted to tell them.”
On Thursday the Victoria Writers Festival issued an email inviting locals to celebrate at the Fernwood Inn.
It read: “Meet ... with an Alice Munro book under your arm. We’ll raise our glasses and read out sentences to each other.”
