Canadian short story writer Alice Munro “has emerged victorious from a clash of the world’s literary giants to win the £60,000 Man Booker International prize,” according to the Guardian. The 77-year-old writer has defeated “a line-up of towering international talent” that pitted Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa against the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, Australia’s Peter Carey and the UK’s contender, the Booker prize-winning Scottish author James Kelman.”  Judge Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, said of Munro’s work that it is “practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise.”

Munro is the third recipient of the £60,000 Man Booker International prize, given on the basis of a writer’s complete body of work and contribution to “fiction on the world stage,” following Ismail Kadare in 2005 and Chinua Achebe in 2007. The author said she was “totally amazed and delighted” to win the award, which will be presented to her on 25 June at Trinity College in Dublin.