Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The Literature prize almost always seems to go to authors I've never heard of, which I'm sure is indicative of my appalling ignorance, rather than any fault on the part of the Prize committee  .
It does often seem to be awarded as a kind of "lifetime achievement award", rather than for one specific work. |
In my impressively humble opinion, Alice Munro was a great choice! Her short stories are good in the classic sense -- and like stories by Borges, they're so compressed that people often compare them to miniature novels -- but the kinds of characters she writes about wouldn't have been as closely observed or even understood until now. Her short story,
"Five Points", actually changed a town; the collection in which it appears,
Friend of My Youth, deserves to be on your reading list.
An excellent interview with Munro appears
here. I love the fact she talks about a "soggy" paragraph.