Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.”
    Faced with this welcome event, Penguin in Canada, and Vintage in the United States, issued a paperback book version of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” with a preface by Polley, as
Away From Her
, with cover images from the film. The cover and packaging notwithstanding, the title inside remains Munro’s; that is, she did not concede her story’s title to the film’s. While Munro’s stories have been used as bases for dramatic forms for some time – the longstanding popularity of “How I Met My Husband” as a play is notable – the critical success of
Away from Her
as a feature seems to portend more such transformations from her large body of fictional work. In 2008 the Blyth Festival produced
Courting Johanna
, Marcia Johnson’s adaptation of “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” a fine rendering of that story on the stage. According to Munro’s agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, that same story has been optioned for a film and there has been interest in other stories from Hollywood too: “Runaway” was optioned in 2008 by Jane Campion and the Juliet triptych has been optioned by Pedro Almodóvar’s production company. 14
    On May 27, 2009, Munro was announced as winner of the third Man Booker International Prize, following Albanian Ismail Kadare (2005) and Nigerian Chinua Achebe (2007). Although
The Beggar Maid
was among the shortlisted books for the 1980 Booker-McConnell Prize, which is awarded annually to a single novel, and her British editor at Chatto & Windus, Alison Samuel, tried valiantly to have her subsequent books considered for that award, their status as collections of stories has precluded her work’s participation in that competition since then. The Man Booker International Prize, however, is awarded “for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” The creation of this second and larger award – it brings with it a prize of sixty thousand pounds – may well have been designed with a short story writer like Munro in mind, since she had been so long frozen out of consideration for the older Booker Prize.While, like the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, “literary excellence [is] its sole focus,” the Man Booker International Prize “is significantly different” from its predecessor “in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.” The prize aims at recognizing literary excellence by maintaining an open competition – Munro was selected from a shortlist of fourteen – and by defining that excellence broadly: writers writing in any language are eligible, although they must have had at least three books translated into English.
    Before taking up the specifics of the prize, the details of the judges’ deliberations, and the ultimate import of Munro’s selection, it seems useful to say something about her reputation in Britain. When Barber began representing Munro in the late 1970s, she worked through Abner Stein, a British agent who represented all of her authors there – he placed the British editions of
The Beggar Maid
and
The Moons of Jupiter
with Allen Lane. During this period, Barber had met and become friends with Carmen Callil, who had founded Virago Press – an avowedly feminist publisher. In 1982, Callil moved to Chatto & Windus as Managing Director and when it became available, she acquired
The Progress of Love
. This was an appropriate pairing since Chatto then published “the big women writers” – A.S. Byatt, Toni Morrison – according to Munro’s editor there, Alison Samuel. Recalling this move, Callil said that the growth of Munro’s readership in the U.K. was very slow, happening by word of mouth. For her part, Callil made sure that Munro had good covers and that she was presented in a literary fashion; “not vulgarized,” she has said. “Gradually,” she continued, Munro “did it herself.” Callil went on to say that “When you’re publishing a genius” the publisher’s role is none too difficult.
    Munro came over to Britain a couple of times during the 1980s and early ’90s to promote her books – Samuel recalls one tour that included Scotland, during which Munro was looked after by Ben Macintyre, now a novelist and a journalist with the
Times
of London. Munro told