Canadian author pips Mahasweta, Naipaul to win Booker

Alice Munro, one of Canada's most celebrated writers, has won the third Man Booker International Prize. Mahashweta Devi and V S Naipaul were among 13 other writers who were short listed for the award this year.

The prize worth $95,000 is awarded once every two years to recognise a living author for his/her contribution to literature and to highlight the author's creativity and development on a global scale. It was first awarded to Ismail Kadare in 2005.

The 77-year-old author, popular for her short stories, said, "I am totally amazed and delighted."

The judging panel which included writer Jane Smiley, writer, academic and musician Amit Chaudhuri, and essay and film script writer Andrey Kurkov, praised Munro, saying 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 panel said.

Munro's stories frequently appear in publications such as 'The New Yorker', 'The Atlantic Monthly', 'Grand Street', 'Mademoiselle', and 'The Paris Review'. Her first collection of stories, 'Dance of the Happy Shades' (1968) was highly acclaimed and won the Governor General's Literary Award, Canada's most prestigious literary prize.

Her success was followed by 'Lives of Girls and Women' (1971), which won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award. In 1980 'The Beggar Maid' was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction.

Munro will receive the prize at the award ceremony on June 25 at Trinity College, Dublin.