Penguin Group (Canada) author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize. The prize, worth £60,000 or roughly $100,000 CDN, is the international version of the UK's Man Booker Prize and is awarded once every two years to an author for a body of work with outstanding international impact. Authors Peter Carey, E.L. Doctorow, V.S Naipaul and Joyce Carol Oates were among the 2009 finalists.
The judging panel said: ‘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.'
Munro is one of Canada's most celebrated writers and Penguin Group (Canada) publishes her entire body of work including The Love of a Good Woman, The View from Castle Rock, Lives of Girls and Women and Runaway, currently under adaptation for film by Jane Campion. Originally from the small southwestern Ontario community of Wingham, Munro has garnered praise for her tales of women living in small towns. She is a three-time Governor General’s Award winner, a two-time Giller Prize winner and was also nominated for the international Booker in 2007.
Penguin will release the paperback edition of Munro’s My Best Stories, with an Introduction by Margaret Atwood, in October, 2009. “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time,” says Atwood in her Introduction. “Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.”
Penguin Group (Canada) began publishing Canadian and international titles in 1977, and quickly became known as one of Canada's pre-eminent publishers of literary, thought-provoking fiction, and non-fiction. The company was named 2008 Publisher of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers’ Association, and in 2009 received a record nine nominations including Publisher of the Year.
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