Finally, the country often considered too dull to notice, Canada, has won a Nobel Prize for Literature, not counting Bellow, and the winner is a deserving one - Alice Munro - a modest person who has lived most of her life in semi-rural Ontario (as the BBC put it), and in the process, become universal, without being provincial. Or overtly political.
Canadians will know that we have had other late geniuses who might have been so laurelled - Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Morley Callaghan, AM Klein and PK Page come to mind, as do other expats like Wyndham Lewis or Malcolm Lowry. Leonard Cohen might have been a lively and surprising choice, but if him, why not Dylan?
Of the living, younger generations, Atwood, Carson, Ondaatje, Martel, and George Elliott Clarke have been developing a considerable and viable international reputation. Their dream is not to be this day. This is a day for all Canadian writers and readers to rejoice though - we now have a genuinely world-class author that the world has told us they love as much as "we" do.
Canadians will know that we have had other late geniuses who might have been so laurelled - Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Morley Callaghan, AM Klein and PK Page come to mind, as do other expats like Wyndham Lewis or Malcolm Lowry. Leonard Cohen might have been a lively and surprising choice, but if him, why not Dylan?
Of the living, younger generations, Atwood, Carson, Ondaatje, Martel, and George Elliott Clarke have been developing a considerable and viable international reputation. Their dream is not to be this day. This is a day for all Canadian writers and readers to rejoice though - we now have a genuinely world-class author that the world has told us they love as much as "we" do.
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