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The Swedish Academy's Peter Englund announced this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story".
The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901.
Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway.
Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000).
Last year's recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan.
Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950.
ChekovShe had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time.
Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Munro's first collection, and it went on to win Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award.
In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work.
BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said Munro had been "at the very top of her game since she started".
"Very few writers are her equal," he said, adding "she gets to the heart of what it is to be human".
"I thought she might not win because she's not overtly political; and of late the Nobel has tended to go to political writers."
The award "probably won't make a commercial difference" to the author, he added, but it "makes a huge difference to how her work will be viewed in historical terms".
"If she hadn't won it before she died, I think it would have been a terrible, terrible omission."
Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976.
Often compared to Anton Chekhov, she is known for writing about the human spirit and a regular theme of her work is the dilemma faced by young girls growing up and coming to terms with living in a small town.
The Nobel academy praised her "finely tuned storytelling, which is characterised by clarity and psychological realism".
Since the 1960s, Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories.
Her early stories capture the difference between her own experiences growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.
RetirementIn an interview in 2003, she described the 1960s as "wonderful".
End Quote Alice MunroI think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way."
It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said.
Her writing has brought her several awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize and The Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Other notable books include Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are, The Progress of Love and Runaway.
In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Several of her stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which became Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.
Munro revealed earlier this year that her latest book, Dear Life, published in 2012, would be her last.
In an interview with the Canadian publication the National Post, she said the novel was "a little more special in that I'm probably not going to write anymore".
She continued: "It's nice to go out with a bang.
"Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way.
"And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable."
In 2009, Munro revealed she had been receiving treatment for cancer. She also had bypass surgery for a heart condition.
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