At the time of announcement, Jian gets reaction from The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman and Canadian novelist and short story writer Joseph Boyden.
Treisman, who has been editing Munro’s short stories for over a decade, said the win has been a “long time coming.”
“Her name has come up now for years, every October, and there was always a slight deflation when her name wasn’t called,” she said.
Treisman offered Jian a little brainwave into Munro’s writing process. “She never talks about themes. I don’t think she thinks in themes,” she said, “themes obviously egress but I get the sense that she’s feeling her way through stories, not thinking her way through stories.”
“She’s creating people and then watching them impress, and I think sometimes they surprise her.”
Boyden agreed: “It’s like she’s gleefully discovering this world herself”
The novelist and teacher called Munro the bane of every writing teacher’s existence. In class, he teaches his students of short fiction not to rely on exposition, not to use an omniscient narrator and not to go past a certain number of pages.
“She breaks all of those rules in such an amazing way,” he said. “She’s singular in what she does.”
Munro in her own words
Munro spoke to CBC News Network’s early morning host Heather Hiscox in a telephone interview embedded below.
She also spoke to CBC World Report host David Common, telling him she didn’t even know she was on the list until yesterday.
“I think there will now be more thought about Canadian writers as a whole. I think this will help boost our idea of Canadian writing in the world,” she said.
