Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, the BBC reports.

Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”

The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901.

Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway.

Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000).

Last year's recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan.

Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950.

She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time.

Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Munro's first collection, which went on to win Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award.

In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work in 2009, and has also received The Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said Monro had been "at the very top of her game since she started".

"Very few writers are her equal," he said, adding "she gets to the heart of what it is to be human".