Nobel Prize for master of short story Alice Munro

Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2m (£750,000) award since Saul Bellow, who left for the US as a boy and won in 1976.

Seen as a modern Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters. She is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. 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 honour.

“I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win,” Munro said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia.

The award is likely to mark the final chapter in her career. She told Canada’s National Post in June that she was “probably not going to write any more.”

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy which made the award, Peter Englund, said he had not managed to get hold of her but left a message on her answering machine. “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,” Englund added.

Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. Fellow Canadian writer Atwood – who also figured prominently in the Nobel buzz – Tweeted “Hooray! Alice Munro wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.”

Munro’s published work often turns on the difference between Munro’s youth in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.

Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, was born Alice Laidlaw. She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student and had three children. She published her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968 after her marriage collapsed.