Alice Ann Munro, the Canadian short story writer, has won the Nobel Prize in literature.

She's arguably the most popular writer to win the prestigious award - worth $1.2 million and given for a body of work, not a specific title - since Toni Morrison, the last American to win, did so in 1993.







Munro has been praised as one of the greatest contemporary writers of fiction, or, as Cynthia Ozick once put it, "our Chekhov," referring to the Russian master of short stories.

Her selection was only a bit of an upset - at least to British bookmakers who had tagged Japan's Haruki Murakami as the front-runner, just ahead of Munro.




Since the prize was first awarded in 1901, a majority of the winners have been European - although Mario Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru who moved to Spain, won in 2011.

American critics have suggested Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy as prospective Nobel winners.

The Nobel's official website lists the most popular literature laureates in order of popularity: John Steinbeck; Rabindranath Tagore; Ernest Hemingway; William Faulkner; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Winston Churchill; Pablo Neruda; William Golding; and Albert Camus.

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