Alice Munroe wins Nobel Literature prize

File: Alice Munroe

Decorated Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Nobel committee named the 82-year-old writer Thursday as the 110th Nobel laureate in literature. She has become the 13th woman to receive the distinction.

"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," Munro told The Canadian Press from Victoria in a telephone interview. I am "just terribly surprised" she added.

Munro is considered one of the world's greatest living writers of short stories. Her last published collection "Dear Life" in 2012 won the Munroe her third Trillium Book Award.

She is previously won:

• The Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work
• Two Scotiabank Giller Prizes
• Three Governor General's Literary Awards
• The Commonwealth Writers' Prize
• The inaugural Marian Engel Award
• The American National Book Critics Circle Award

Here are some of her celebrated works:

1. 1968 "Dance of the Happy Shades" (Her inaugural work)
2. 1986 "The Progress of Love"
3. 2004 "Runaway"
4. 1978 "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Munroe joins a select group of writers that includes:

• George Bernard Shaw
• Ernest Hemingway
• Herman Hesse
• T.S. Eliot
• Toni Morrison
• Mo Yan
• Tomas Transtromer
• Mario Vargas Llosa
• Saul Bellow
• Wole Soyinka
• Sir Vidia Naipaul

The prize money for 2012 is expected to be about $1.3 million Cdn.

Munroe was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario and later moved to Victoria, B.C., with her first husband. The couple had three children. Following a divorce Munroe returned to Ontario and remarried.