In a 2012 interview with the New Yorker, Munro answered questions on Dear Life and her personal history:

NY: You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?

AM: It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends - other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time...

NY: How did you settle on the short-story form - or did it settle on you?

AM: For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.

Read the full interview here.

Canadian Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, Reuters Niklas Pollard writes, for finely-tuned story telling that made her what the award-giving committee called the "master of the contemporary short story".

"Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov," the Swedish Academy said in statement on its website as it awarded the prize of 8 million crowns ($1.25 million).

Munro, 82, started writing stories in her teens. She is mainly known for her short stories and has published many collections over the years. Her works include "The View from Castle Rock" in 2006 and "Too Much Happiness" three years later. "Her texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning," the Academy said.

Munro lives in Clinton, not far from her childhood home in southwestern Ontario, Canada.
In 2009, she revealed that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and been treated for cancer. She is known to be averse to publicity and rarely gives interviews. The literature prize is the fourth of this year's crop of prizes, which were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and awarded for the first time in 1901.

According to the Star, Ladbrokes gaming company had placed 4-1 odds on Munro, the 82-year-old Canadian author, receiving the Prize - behind Haruki Murakami, who was given 5-2 odds. Munro has been granted a number of awards over her career, including the Man Booker Prize, The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award and others. Her last book, Dear Life, is a collection of stories published in 2012. Munro recently said she will probably give up writing.

An early tweet from the Nobel committee below...

The Nobel Prize Committee announces the Nobel Prize winners in chemistry for 2013:

Chemists used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks. Today, the modelling is carried out in computers. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes. Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today.

Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed. In a fraction of a millisecond, electrons jump from one atomic nucleus to the other. Classical chemistry has a hard time keeping up; it is virtually impossible to experimentally map every little step in a chemical process. Aided by the methods now awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, scientists let computers unveil chemical processes, such as a catalyst’s purification of exhaust fumes or the photosynthesis in green leaves.

The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking in that they managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics. Previously, chemists had to choose to use either or. The strength of classical physics was that calculations were simple and could be used to model really large molecules. Its weakness, it offered no way to simulate chemical reactions. For that purpose, chemists instead had to use quantum physics. But such calculations required enormous computing power and could therefore only be carried out for small molecules.

This year’s Nobel Laureates in chemistry took the best from both worlds and devised methods that use both classical and quantum physics. For instance, in simulations of how a drug couples to its target protein in the body, the computer performs quantum theoretical calculations on those atoms in the target protein that interact with the drug. The rest of the large protein is simulated using less demanding classical physics.

Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube. Simulations are so realistic that they predict the outcome of traditional experiments. (Source: Nobelprize.org)

Reuters Ben Hirschler and Balazs Koranyi report: A Pakistani teenage activist shot by the Taliban and a Japanese author who writes about alienation and a fractured modern world are tipped as Nobel Prize winners. The discussions on the prizes are wrapped in secrecy. The 18 members of the Swedish Academy who award the Nobel prize for literature are only allowed to discuss the prize within the walls of the Academy itself. Minutes are only made public half a century after the meetings.

READ: Japanese author, Pakistani teenage activist tipped for Nobels