The award is the latest in a string of honours for Munro
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Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize. She saw off competition from 13 other nominees, including Australian two-time Booker winner Peter Carey and Briton James Kelman, to win the £60,000 award. It is given every two years to a living author for an entire body of work that has contributed to fiction across the world stage. Munro, 77, who lives in Ontario, said: "I am totally amazed and delighted." Her first collection of stories, Dance Of The Happy Shades, published in 1968, won the Governor General's Award, Canada's literary prize. Her success was followed up by Lives Of Girls And Women (1971), which won a Canadian Booksellers Association award.
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To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before
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In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review. This year's judging panel for the international Booker included Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley; writer, academic and musician Amit Chaudhuri; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov. They said in a statement: "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. "To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before." The international Booker was first awarded to Ismail Kadare, from Albania, in 2005, and then to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007. Submissions are not invited and judges compile their own lists, which this year included big hitters such as Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and 2001 Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul. Glaswegian Kelman, who won the main Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late It Was, How Late, was the only UK contender for the award. Munro will receive the prize and a trophy at a ceremony on 25 June at Trinity College, Dublin.
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