News of Alice Munro’s Man Booker International prize win is cause for celebration. Not just because she’s a woman but because she has relentlessly followed her muse. In terms of publishing she has done everything wrong. She writes short stories. Worse, she writes regional short stories, based mostly in the Canadian Pacific Northwest. Any book publisher can tell you these are commercial death-knells, especially for women. Yet Munro has become acknowledged as one of the finest fiction writers in the world, without ever compromising her art, or attempting to please some notion of what is “sale-able”. Virginia Woolf, who understood a great deal about the difficulty of being a woman writer, said the secret was integrity: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.”

Congratulations to Alice Munro for having the courage to write what she wants to write!