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What does it mean to be included in the O. Henry Prize Stories? How does an author refine their art? We've given the O. Henry Prize-winning authors free rein to share their thoughts on these questions and others, and the result is a rare treat.
(Browse our archive of featured authors from The O. Henry Prize Stories.)
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Alice Munro
2010 PEN/O. Henry Award-winning Author
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To be included in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is like being validated as a short story writer (as a writer, really). You can always use that nice warm feeling.
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I have been writing for a long time—I really don't think of it as writing anymore but as who I am and what I do—as Chester Himes said: "A fighter fights, a writer writes"—maybe it is not that simple—but if I stopped writing today, I would not be a writer—I would be someone who wrote books once upon a time—writing is about doing the work daily, internally, as well as externally, without cease.
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Alice Munro was born in 1931, grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View From Castle Rock; and Too Much Happiness—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and a Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W.H. Smith Book Award, and the U.S.'s National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.
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Presently I am collecting my micro-stories into a book, and finishing, I think, a novel about Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till |
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