Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

him of her connections to James Hogg and to Scotland, and she spoke also about the family book she wanted to do. As well,Samuel recalls her own special need for the
Selected Stories
in her market, and the role she played in putting that volume together.
    There are no U.K. sales figures for
The Progress of Love
, but
Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets
, and
Selected Stories
each sold about 4,000 hardback copies and 20,000 to 30,000 (with
Open Secrets
jumping to 46,000) in paper.
The Love of a Good Woman
sold almost 6,000 hardbacks while
Hateship
reached toward 7,000 – and the former sold just under 34,000 in paper, the latter almost 40,000. Seen through sales,
Runaway
was Munro’s breakthrough in the U.K. – it sold 7,200 in hardback but over 70,000 in paper. Given its subject,
The View from Castle Rock
did even better, selling almost 11,000 in hardback, although just under 30,000 in paper.
Too Much Happiness
, no doubt driven in part by the Man Booker International Prize publicity, had sold about 16,500 hardbacks by late August 2010. 15 This book-by-book progress in Britain set the stage for her Man Booker International Prize win in May 2009.
    The award Munro received in Dublin in June 2009 was the result of a thorough process, one open to scrutiny and intended to excite both interest and some controversy through its selections. The longstanding Nobel Prize – with which the Man Booker International Prize is often compared – emerges from a closed process and there is often a perception that politics – of both the small
p
and capital
P
variety – play a role there. (One notes in passing that Mario Vargas Llosa, one of those in play in the final voting for the Man Booker International in 2009, has just won the Nobel.) The Man Booker International recognizes “one writer’s overall contribution on the world stage”; there are no submissions from publishers; the recipient has to be living; and, above all, it is an
international
award. Both Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of the
Economist
and administrator of the Man Booker International Prize, and Jane Smiley, chair of the three-person panel of judges, have insisted on this international quality, on its translinguistic recognition, and on its emphasis on literary merit alone. The other two judges working with Smiley were Andrey Kurkov and Amit Chaudhuri. Born of Ukrainian extraction in the U.S.S.R. to a Soviet military officer, Kurkov speaks Russian as his first language but has learned nineteen languages. He isamong the biggest-selling writers in Russia and is known for his mordant black humour; he writes in exile. Chaudhuri is a Bengali from Calcutta, although educated in English at University College London and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He is a person, Rocco has said, of “fierce views.”
    The judges met four times in all. First in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008, where they agreed on a list of about seventy possible writers. The idea at that point was that each judge would go away and read one book by each person. A second meeting was held in England in January 2009, where they arrived at a long shortlist or a short longlist of forty – at that point each judge was to read two books by each author. After that, they met again by teleconference and refined the list – agreeing that they would each be reading three books by each author.
    In March 2009 the judges met at the New York Public Library and agreed upon the shortlist of fourteen authors that was made public. They wanted the list to attract attention and to be controversial – they wanted people to pay attention. It did, it was, and they did. The list was quite diverse, which was what they were aiming at: there were the expected (Munro, V.S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa) and the unexpected (Antonio Tabucchi, James Kelman, Ludmila Ulitskaya) – and another seven too.
    During their final deliberations and voting, the survivors from the announced list of fourteen had become just four: E.L. Doctorow, James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Munro. For her part, Smiley was direct and determined in convincing her colleagues of her sense that Munro was their clear choice. Reading Munro, as she had done with each of her books since the 1970s, Smiley had come to see that every Munro story is a surprise, a quiet surprise. And that there is nobody else like her: the historical fiction is absolutely true and her insights about women are too – she never makes a wrong move as