Nobel Prize Winner Literature Alice Munro: 82-Year-Old Short-Story Author Writing Since 1968 Considered 'Master Of The Modern Short Story' Wins Prestigious Award Plus $1.2 Million

Nobel Prize winner Literature Alice Munro: The short-story author is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award from the Swedish Academy since Saul Bellow, who left for the U.S. as a boy and won in 1976, according to the Associated Press.

Alice Munro's work consist almost entirely of short stories. The 82-year-old previously won the Mab Booker International Prize in 2009 for her work throughout her writing career. On Thursday, she was awarded as the winner for the Nobel Prize in Literature for being the "master of the modern short story".

"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," Alice Munro said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia after it was revealed that she was the Nobel Prize winner in Literature.

Munro told Canadian broadcaster CBC she was "surprised and delighted" at the news, which she heard in a pre-dawn phone call from her daughter who found out before she did.

"It just seems impossible. It seems so splendid a thing to happen that I can't describe it. It's more than I can say," Munro said.

From her first short story in 1968 called "Dance of the Happy Shades" to "Dear Life" in 2012 with 17 other works in between. Now, Munro is $1.2 million richer for her success as an author for so many years.

She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.

"She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection," the academy's permanent secretary, Peter Englund told the AP. "If you read Alice Munro sooner or later you will stand face to face with yourself and you will go from that meeting a different person."