Calling her a ???master of the contemporary short story,??? the Swedish Academy awarded 82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Literature today. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes not long after she announced her retirement from fiction). After 14 story collections, Munro has reached at least a couple generations of writers with her psychologically subtle stories about ordinary men and women in Huron County, Ontario, her birthplace and home. Only the 13th woman writer to win the Nobel, Munro has previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, the Governor General???s Literary Award for Fiction in Canada three times (1968, 1978, and 1986), and two O. Henry Awards (2006 and 2008). Her regional fiction draws as much from her Ontario surroundings as does the work of the very best so-called ???regional??? writers, and captivating interactions of character and landscape tend drive her work more so than intricate plotting. Of that region she loves, Munro has said: ???It means something to me that no other country can???no matter how important historically that other country may be, how ???beautiful,??? how lively and interesting. I am intoxicated by this particular landscape??? I speak the language.??? The language she may have learned from the ???brick houses, the falling-down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire.??? But the short story form she learned from writers like Carson McCullers, Flannery O???Conner, and Eudora Welty. She names all three in a 2001 interview with The Atlantic, and also mentions Chekhov and ???a lot of writers that I found in The New Yorker in the fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did???about emotions and places.??? Munro was no young literary phenom???she did not achieve fame in her twenties with stories in The New Yorker. A mother of three children, she ???learned to write in the slivers of time she had.??? She published her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968 at 37, an advanced age for writers today, so many of whom have several novels under their belts by their early thirties. Munro always meant to write a novel, many in fact, but ???there was no way I could get that kind of time,??? she said: