Patrice Lawrence has been named the new Waterstones children’s laureate, and is planning to use her appointment to highlight how reading helps communities “connect and cohere” in “times of fragmentation”.

Lawrence, known for her YA novels including Orangeboy and Needle, succeeds Frank Cottrell-Boyce in the role. She was presented with the laureate medal by Cottrell-Boyce at a ceremony hosted by poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay at London’s Barbican Centre on Tuesday.

Launching her two-year tenure, Lawrence said stories could help children “feel seen, understood and, most importantly, valued”, adding: “We are living in a divided world where many people feel isolated – we need this now, more than ever.”

Her laureateship will focus on the potential for shared reading to foster belonging and community, particularly for children who feel marginalised. She also plans to celebrate the “unsung heroes” who nurture readers.

Speaking to the Guardian, Lawrence said she wanted to build an evidence base demonstrating the impact of books on children’s lives, particularly those in care, refugee children, and the children of prisoners.

Lawrence, 59, has become one of Britain’s most celebrated children’s authors since Orangeboy won the Waterstones children’s book prize and the Bookseller YA book prize in 2017. She has since published 16 books spanning picture books and young adult novels, including People Like Stars, Is That Your Mama? and Granny Came Here on the Empire Windrush, winning an MBE for services to literature in 2021 and election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature two years later.

Born to Trinidadian parents in Sussex, her writing often centres on foster care and contemporary Black British life, growing out of an absence she felt as a young reader.

Lawrence’s appointment “gives a much-needed voice to the vulnerable children pushed to the edge of our society,” said Diana Gerald, CEO of BookTrust, which manages the laureate role.

“Patrice is recognised as an essential voice in children’s literature, and booksellers love to recommend her work,” added Nick Campbell, children’s campaign manager at Waterstones. “Her irresistibly compelling novels illuminate the lives of today’s young people.”

Outgoing laureate Cottrell-Boyce spent his time in the role highlighting the way that reading for pleasure can transform children’s outcomes, in tandem with the UK’s National Year of Reading.

Other past laureates include Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson, Malorie Blackman, Lauren Child and Cressida Cowell.

The children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, has urged the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading.

Giving evidence to MPs on the education committee, which is investigating the decline in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and novelist said conversations about children’s reading too often revert to attainment in school.

He said that the “business of learning to read” can put children off the pleasure of reading. “We can teach them all the steps,” he told MPs, “but the important thing is that they dance.”

The number of children reading for pleasure in the UK has declined sharply in recent years. According to the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey, just one in three aged eight to 18 enjoy reading in their spare time – a 36% decrease since 2005.

Cottrell-Boyce said the reasons included screens, austerity, Covid and poverty, including the kind of “furniture poverty” experienced in emergency social housing. “No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed,” he said.

He urged the government to focus on early years and reading for pleasure at home and nursery, with support for parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud to their children as a result of their own negative experiences.

“The drive of government policy for children is always freeing up parents to do more work and putting more childcare in place. If that’s your driver for children, then this is literally the least you can do.”

Cottrell-Boyce, who is coming to the end of his two-year tenure as children’s laureate, said early-years workers were among the lowest paid and the youngest. “In nurseries there are people working who have only just stopped being children themselves.

“At this point in time, it means many of them have had an incredibly diminished experience of education as a whole because of the pandemic.”

He said taking action did not need to cost a lot of money – a lot of the infrastructure was already in place. He said building parental confidence was key, and stressed the joy of “shared reading” in community settings.

“I think the early years are everything,” he told MPs on Tuesday. “Early years is when the cake is baked. Everything after that is icing or ganache, maybe, and candles and helium balloons. It’s all fun but the cake is what matters.”

He said he was optimistic about the future of children’s reading. “I think we can fix it. It seems to me blindingly obvious that what we do is prioritise the pleasure before we get into learning.

“This is something we do with everything else. No parent says to a child, ‘When you’ve learned the offside rule then I will play football with you’. We always put the pleasure first. It seems simple to me that what you do is you make sure that happens as early in life as possible.”

Also giving evidence to MPs was Rebecca Sinclair, the president of the Publishers Association, who said a shift was needed to make reading feel “less worthy”.

She said when parents are reading with their children, it was often about “reading for skill” rather than pleasure, and she said there was not enough time and space in the school day to create joy around reading.

The UK is celebrating the national year of reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

“Our children have been at the sharp end of two great crises: Covid, and just as damagingly, austerity,” Cottrell-Boyce said in his lecture. “We can talk all we like about [the importance of] bedtime stories … but what does that mean to a child with no bed? Or no space for a bed?”

He said that this “furniture poverty”, alongside housing insecurity, means that children are unable to build stable routines around reading. “You’re not going to Narnia because you haven’t got a wardrobe,” he said “Your clothes are stored in bin bags ready for the next move.”

New figures from BookTrust, released to coincide with the lecture, show that daily shared reading among families with children aged eight and under has fallen from 60% in 2021 to 49% in 2025. Yet the proportion of children who “like or love reading” has risen from 66% to 80% over the same period, suggesting that enthusiasm for books remains strong.

It comes as the UK celebrates the National Year of Reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates. The campaign includes launching the first Children’s Booker prize, with a judging panel chaired by Cottrell-Boyce. Three children aged 8-12 will be recruited to help adjudicate. The campaign also involves distributing 72,000 books to children in need, and fostering a “national mission” to make reading a daily habit.

Alongside economic pressures, Cottrell-Boyce told the Guardian about the impact of screens and social media on children’s attention. He said concerns about “addictive” tech platforms were now unavoidable, arguing that children’s attention is being captured by systems designed to maximise engagement.

“These kids are working for big tech,” he said. “We all are. But you’re working for someone who doesn’t love you, who is not going to pay you and doesn’t care how many hours you work. It’s a shocking situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Referring to the growing legal and political scrutiny of technology companies, he added: “These platforms should bear total responsibility. I think these trials are a bit like the big tobacco moment.”

He added that we have failed to communicate what reading offers beyond literacy outcomes. “Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure,” he said.

Despite the scale of the challenges, Cottrell-Boyce said he remains optimistic about children’s reading habits and the work already being done in communities. “Pessimism is a luxury that we can’t afford,” he said. “I do feel optimistic. I’ve met amazing people and seen amazing practice that costs next to nothing.”

Cottrell-Boyce has used his two-year tenure as children’s laureate to promote his Reading Rights campaign, which argues that shared reading should be embedded in early years support, from health visitors to family hubs. The new children’s laureate will be announced in July.

In the opening pages of The Palm House, London is enveloped in a dust storm blown up from the Sahara. As old friends Laura and Putnam meet for a drink in a Southwark pub, a packet of crisps open between them, the occluded atmosphere renders the city unsettlingly strange: the sky is “dark yellow … like iodine”, while the pictures in the evening paper show a “blood red sun”, a “jaundiced” City square, a “prodigious cloud, menacing the Shard”.

Like a Saharan dust storm, Gwendoline Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new. Her female protagonists, often writers themselves, struggle with bad relationships: in First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Women’s prize, Neve grapples with an abusive marriage, while Bridget in 2021’s quietly brutal My Phantoms is caught up with her desperately self-involved mother. The mothers in Riley’s novels are mostly monstrous and persistent, the fathers mostly monstrous and dead. Her stories are not structured around linear plots – nothing much happens – but Riley’s disquieting acuity and her spare and unsparing prose makes them shimmer with tension. She has a phenomenal ear for dialogue, for the myriad ways in which people unknowingly lay themselves bare, both in what they say and, more agonisingly, in what they don’t – or can’t. She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.

In The Palm House, her seventh novel, the tone is subtler, more elegiac. Riley has spoken about the influence on this novel of Penelope Fitzgerald, and, while she has long shared her economy and pin-sharp precision, a measure of Fitzgerald’s wry tenderness is strikingly in evidence in the friendship between Laura and Putnam on which the novel turns. The result is a slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes.

Putnam has been deputy editor of Sequence, a highbrow critical magazine, for 25 years, but, shaken by his father’s death and unable to stick the crass new editor, Simon Halfpenny (“call me Shove”), he has recently resigned. It is, as one of his colleagues observes, like “the ravens leaving the Tower”: the meticulously constructed kingdom of Putnam’s life duly falls, plunging him into despair. Meanwhile his London, where people can not only make a living wage pursuing their passions but also afford a flat near the office, is already out of date. Laura, the book’s narrator, works part time for a popular history magazine (Putnam snootily disparages it as “Take a Break”) and is grateful for the money: “I could pay bills and make choices. I could feel like a person.” Like many thirtysomethings in London she lives in rented house shares or a friend-of-a‑friend’s spare room. She finds Putnam’s stubborn misery baffling. From his ivory tower Putnam dismisses her indifference: “You never cared about anything in your life.”

Laura does not contradict him. But slowly, delicately, in a series of immaculately rendered vignettes, Riley takes us back into Laura’s past: a fraught relationship with her blithely self-absorbed mother, a teenage crush on a standup comedian that ends in horror, an affair with an actor “so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of being an actor”. From childhood, Laura has learned to be the audience, the listener who accommodates others, who makes herself scarce. In one striking scene a palm reader in Dubrovnik gently rubs the warts from her hands, revealing the “fresh, pink” skin underneath: it takes a stranger to show kindness, to relieve her of her suffering and her shame.

Laura’s recollections are offered levelly and without self-pity but, against their small annihilations, the affectionate understanding she shares with Putnam feels like a quiet miracle. Riley writes with a poet’s control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. A man contemptuously disparaging his wife has “a cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric”. Laura’s monstrous father sniffs Laura’s teenage armpits and declares, “It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?” Riley has always skewered cruelty with shattering exactitude. What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear. Riley’s characters remain, as humans must, mostly unknown to one another, the experiences that have formed them hidden from view, but in the attentive steadiness of friendship there is hope, perhaps even healing. The novel ends as it begins, in the pub, in easy companionship, packets of crisps split down the seams and spread out on “bright silver platters” that embody, in their ordinariness, a kind of benediction.

The Trump administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.

“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.

Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

Soyinka speculated that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reassess his visa, which he said he would not attend.

According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, seen by Agence France-Presse, officials have cancelled his visa, citing US state department regulations that allow “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.

Reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre, he jokingly called it a “rather curious love letter from an embassy”, while telling any organisations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka said.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The Trump administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably targeting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.

“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours from top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.

His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.

In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka left the door open to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

Trump’s crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.

At a time when its leadership is in question and its mission challenged, the Library of Congress has named a new US poet laureate: the much-honored author and translator Arthur Sze.

The library announced on Monday that Sze, 74, had been appointed to a one-year term, starting this fall. The author of 12 poetry collections and recipient last year of a lifetime achievement award from the library, he succeeds Ada Limón, who had served for three years. Previous laureates also include Joy Harjo, Louise Glück and Billy Collins.

Speaking during a recent Zoom interview with the Associated Press, Sze acknowledged some misgivings when Rob Casper, who heads the library’s poetry and literature center, called him in June about becoming the next laureate. He wondered about the level of responsibilities and worried about the upheaval since Donald Trump fired the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, in May. After thinking about it overnight, he called Casper back and happily accepted.

“I think it was the opportunity to give something back to poetry, to something that I’ve spent my life doing,” he explained, speaking from his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “So many people have helped me along the way. Poetry has just helped me grow so much, in every way.”

Sze’s new job begins during a tumultuous year for the library, a 200-year-old, non-partisan institution that holds a huge archive of books published in the US. Trump abruptly fired Hayden after conservative activists accused her of imposing a “woke” agenda, criticism that the president has expressed often as he seeks sweeping changes at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian museums and other cultural institutions.

Hayden’s ouster was sharply criticized by congressional Democrats, leaders in the library and scholarly community and such former laureates as Limón and Harjo. It also led to a debate over who has the authority to decide on an interim replacement.

Although the White House announced that it had named the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, as the acting librarian, daily operations are being run by a longtime official at the library, Robert Randolph Newlen. Events such as the annual National Book Festival have continued without interruption or revision.

Laureates are forbidden to take political positions, although the tradition was breached in 2003 when Collins publicly stated his objections to President George W Bush’s push for war against Iraq.

Newlen is identified in Monday’s announcement as acting librarian, a position he was in line for according to the institution’s guidelines. He praised Sze, whose influences range from ancient Chinese poets to Wallace Stevens, for his “distinctly American” portraits of south-west landscapes and for his “great formal innovation”.

Sze’s official title is “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry”, a 1985 renaming of a position established in 1937 as “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”. The mission is loosely defined as a kind of literary ambassador, to “raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry”. Initiatives have included Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, for which the public would share thoughts on works of their choosing, and Limón’s You Are Here, which included poetry installations at national parks.

Sze wants to focus on a passion going back more than a half-century to his undergraduate years at the University of California, Berkeley – translation. He remembers reading some English-language editions of Chinese poetry, finding the work “antiquated and dated” and deciding to translate some of it himself, writing out the Chinese characters and engaging with them “on a much deeper level” than he had expected. Besides his own poetry, he has published The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese.

“I personally learned my own craft of writing poetry through translating poetry,” the New York City-born son of Chinese immigrants said. “I often think that people think of poetry as intimidating, or difficult, which isn’t necessarily true. And I think one way to deepen the appreciation of poetry is to approach it through translation.”

A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive “in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions”, to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah’s first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania’s tourism boom during the 1990s.

The novel follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, chronicling their uneasy passage into adulthood. Karim’s story begins on Pemba Island, where his mother, Raya, leaves her joyless marriage while he’s a toddler, first returning with him to her parents in Unguja and later relocating without him to Dar es Salaam, where she remarries. When Karim enrols for university in the city, he stays with her and her husband, Haji Othman. He returns to Zanzibar once he finishes his studies to take up a position in development. There, Karim crosses paths with Fauzia – once a sickly, epileptic child, now a confident young woman training to become a teacher. The two fall helplessly in love.

Sometime during Karim’s second year of university, 13-year-old Badar arrives at the Othmans’ house, sent by his adopted parents as a servant (“There was to be no more school for him. There was no money”). Homesick and haunted by his abandonment, Badar gradually learns to adjust to his new life. While Raya, Haji and Karim are all kind to him, Haji’s father appears to resent him. Badar senses that the hostility isn’t exactly directed at him, but rather at his real father, “a restless troublemaker”, as he’s often been told. It isn’t until several years later, when he is accused of theft by the old man, that the reader is finally let in on the truth about Badar’s father and his ties to the Othman family. The revelation is a modest development, only confirming Badar’s suspicion that “there was something degrading about his circumstances”. True intrigue begins when Karim, now married to Fauzia, invites Badar to start anew with them in Zanzibar, arranging a job for him at a boutique hotel: a gesture that leaves Badar profoundly, almost existentially, indebted to him.

Debt, both as a real monetary burden and a symbolic relational pact, has been a recurring feature of Gurnah’s writing. In his 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure, impoverished Hassan Omar invites himself into his wealthy uncle’s home in Nairobi, on the basis of an inheritance that is owed to his mother. By the Sea featured two Zanzibari migrants who reunite in an English seaside town, years after a loan gone awry had led one to lose his family home to the other. Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker prize, told the story of young Yusuf’s quest for freedom after he is pawned to an ivory merchant by his parents. It is set in what is now Tanzania; then, at the turn of the 20th century, a beleaguered place on the verge of German colonisation.

Theft is in dialogue with these books, with the motif of debt grounding wider ruminations: on hospitality, autonomy and servitude as well as the nuanced distinction between obligation and generosity. For Gurnah, the record-keeping principle underlying a ledger is also one that animates human exchange more broadly, corrupting even the most innocent of bonds. As the tale progresses, Karim increasingly hectors and dominates Badar, demanding gratitude, deference and eventually even subordination and silence, convinced that without his help, Badar “would have ended up living on the streets as some kind of a criminal”.

The final third is the novel’s most compelling section. Karim’s testiness with Badar takes a toll on their friendship, while his relationship with Fauzia is complicated by the arrival of a difficult baby and Karim’s domineering mien. The island, meanwhile, is in the throes of profound change. Foreign exchange rules have been relaxed. More and more hotels dot the coast; houses once belonging to Omani sultans and Indian-owned buildings abandoned amid the post-independence exodus have been transformed into heritage retreats, while old premises, now in the hands of foreign investors, are “gilded fantasies of oriental luxury”. Everywhere, European tourists with no Kiswahili and little regard for the locals “went about their pleasures with frowning intensity”.

The same holds for the EU-marshalled aid workers Badar encounters, volunteer tourists who journey “all this way to do their good deeds”, bringing condescension, “such ill humour” and an insensitive spirit of adventure. Gurnah’s sly pairing of volunteer tourism and the colonial enterprise, as when Badar muses on the kind of work one hotel guest, the director of an international relief exchange programme, would be doing if she was around “during the old good times of the empire”, hints at harms glossed over in the name of “goodwill”. The idea of poisoned benevolence is picked up again when Karim becomes involved with a British volunteer, a software engineer bent on a local affair. “Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?” Badar wonders. “Or was it that coming to a place like theirs she felt entitled to please herself because in the end it was she that mattered?” Powerful, affecting and provocative, Theft is a vital addition to Gurnah’s remarkable body of work; a novel steeped in heartbreak and loss but one that ultimately refuses despair.

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Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children”.

The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak.

The Reading Rights Summit is part of Cottrell-Boyce’s broader campaign to address the “invisible privilege and inequality” within children’s reading.

The event will feature speeches and panels made up of professionals across education, science, health and politics with the view of sharing best practice and making recommendations to policymakers.

Cottrell-Boyce, who was announced as the children’s laureate in July last year, wants to “turn the dial” on the conversation about reading. “People always couch it in terms of educational attainment and cultural capital, and these things are really important. But I’d also like to bring into the limelight the health benefits and the mental health benefits.”

He wants to “move the conversation, for now, out of school” and into homes and nurseries. His speech at the summit will highlight research from BookTrust which found that six out of 10 parents and carers of 0- to seven-year-olds wish they had known earlier how important it is to read with their children.

“We know that if you arrive at school never having been read to, you’ve been given this enormous disadvantage. Your first encounter with a book is as this sort of alien piece of kit” that you have to decode. “You’re at a massive disadvantage over kids whose first experience of a book is cuddled up on the sofa.”

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In his speech, Cottrell-Boyce will also draw attention to children “who instead of turning the pages, try to swipe them or make the pictures grow bigger with their fingers”.

Children are facing a “happiness recession”, which “really puzzles me and makes me anxious”, said Cottrell-Boyce. He noted that children have “borne the brunt of a series of crises” – austerity, the pandemic and Brexit. “These all hit children first and hardest.”

Alex McCormick – who raised more than £250,000 for Spellow Hub library, torched by rioters last summer – will also speak at the summit. “My laureateship began under the baleful light of the burning of a library”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “The people who did that did not know how to make sense of the world.”

Cottrell-Boyce said focusing on literacy in early years takes an “act of courage” by government, because the outcomes will play out “in 20 years” rather than the short-term. However, “it can be done quite easily” – “so many of the problems that we’re facing seem intractable, and I think this is completely fixable”.

“We need Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Lisa Nandy – and more – to come together and help us make sure that every single child has access to books, reading and the transformative ways in which they improve long-term life chances”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “Put simply, shared reading is an effective, economic health intervention that should be available to all.”

Alice Munro, short story master and Nobel Laureate, dies at 92

May 14 2024

Canadian author Alice Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on May 13. She was 92.
Munro, who is best known for her many short story collections depicting the lives of those living in small town Ontario, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, when she was recognized by the Swedish Academy as a “master of the contemporary short story.” At the time of her award, Peter Englund, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised Munro as “a fantastic portrayer of human beings,” noting that her consistent depiction of the rural Canadian landscape proved that she “has everything she needs in this small patch of earth.”

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