Alice Munro won’t let her Nobel go to her head — that’s why she’s a true Canadian writer

Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for being so dull and functional compared with our glitzy neighbour to the south. Sorry about Celine Dion. And above all, sorry for failing to produce much of anything great apart from Niagara Falls and the Rockies, which we can’t take credit for anyway.

So when Alice Munro, our most quietly adored author, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last week, the entire nation gave a collective whoop and then glanced furtively over our shoulder as if to say, ‘Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?’

Munro is the most unlikely of Nobel laureates. Her body of work consists almost exclusively of short stories set in small towns about the lives of middle-class Canadians.