Man Booker International

Was Alice Munro your choice?

No, but I'm happy to see her get some more publicity. I've only read one of her collections, The Progress of Love, and must admit it didn't make me want to read more. But that was ten years or more ago, and my tastes have changed so much since then - and I suspect she's someone you like more as you get older - so I'd be happy to give her another go.

Any recommendations from anyone?

Alice Munro was my choice, but I have to admit I'm very unfamiliar with a good chunk of the shortlisted authors. But this is a great win for Munro. It's actually not her first brush with Booker glory. She was shortlisted for the prize back in 1980 for "The Beggar Maid", a collection of interconnected stories that I suppose passed for a novel.

I think she's a marvelous writer, arguably the most accomplished practitioner of the short story today. She seems mostly be regarded as a "writer's writer", so hopefully this award will make her work a little more accessible to a wider general audience.

I believe she's got one or two editions out there of her collected stories, which I presume she hand-picked from her own repertoire. Many seem to feel that "Open Secrets", published in 1994, is her strongest collection, and it's a great book. Her 1998 collection, "The Love of a Good Woman", also did very well (winning the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in the US). Of her early work, the quasi-novel "Lives of Girls and Women" is generally the most celebrated.

People wanting to have a taste of her fiction can, of course, just go over to The New Yorker website, where quite a few of her more recent stories are available in the archives. (You have to pay for the older ones, I think.)

I'm delighted that Alice Munro has won and second everything that Archer has said. Munro is a superb writer and (imho) the best, living, writer of short stories.

I fell in love with her work when I read 'Lives of Girls and Women' as part of a Canadian Literature course when I was a mature EngLit student in 1988; since then I have read everything she has written (apart from a few 'New Yorker' stories). However, I did not begin to understand her skill and power, fully, until I began to try story writing for myself. I sat for hours taking her sentences and modes apart to try to see how she magics everything together. Each sentence, described gesture, scrap of history, or piece of dialogue (and so on) conveys decades of life, depths of personality or sheaves of aching backstory. As someone else has already said (in one of yesterday's news reports) there is more in one Alice Munro story than in most novels.

A few critics have scorned her work in the past ... because it is 'short story' or because she writes about 'small communities' or some such other patronising dismissal, but this is to ignore her actual writing, which is so perfectly crafted. There is a quotation from 'Lives of Girls and Women' that I love, and which I think summarises just a little of the depth, power and empathy found in her work: "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."

PS JohnSelf. I'm 53 now and love and respect her work more than ever, but I was about 31 when 'LofG&W' got me hooked. I suggest 'Runaway' but all the collections are wonderful. Do you remember what you read?

I am not as keen on Munro as many of my fellow Canadians (and a lot of critics) are. While I certainly enjoy reading her stories, I find they don't stay with me for very long. I do recommend The View from Castle Rock because the linked stories make it almost a novel. And certainly Lives of Girls and Women deserves its reputation as a classic.

Yes DrMama, it was The Progress of Love. I can remember, in that peculiar way, what house I read it in, so can pinpoint it down to when I was 23. A frightening 13 years ago now! I have recently ordered the Bloomsbury Classics edition of Lives of Girls and Women so I'm glad you (and Kevin) recommend it!

Alice Munro is a worthy winner. But so would have been Arnost Lustig, E L Doctrow, Mario Vargas Llosa. Peter Carey, and most of the other contenders. It baffles me how the judges make their decision. What I love about this prize is looking at the list of contenders and seeking out their work in my local library. This year I discovered Arnost Lustig, Antonio Tabucchi and Dubravka Ugresic. Just as 2005's listing brought me the joys of reading A B Yehoshua. And it encourages me to re-read authors I haven't read for years, such as Alice Munro.

Alice Munro has always been my personal pick for the next Nobel Prize, but I suppose she isn't political enough. I think she should be recognized more, if only so more readers get to read her more closely to see why she's so wonderful. I suggest the Collected Stories or Runaway to begin with.

For the record I was 25 when I first started reading her, I'm 28 now. :)