Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2013 video, Nobel laureate Alice Munro talks about her fascination with reading and writing at an early age in Canada’s countryside, how she can become “desperately consumed” with writing, and the ways in which her writing life changed throughout her long-standing career. Munro died at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024.

This conversation between acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood and Nobel laureate Alice Munro was streamed live via Google+ Hangout to an audience at New York City’s Symphony Space as part of the live series Selected Shorts. Despite a few glitches, the live stream brought together Atwood, who was in Toronto, having been snowed out of New York, and Munro, who was in Victoria, British Columbia, for a unique exchange.

Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announces Alice Munro as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature and comments on what her work has meant to him.