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Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International award, picking up £60,000 in prize money.
The award, which is given every two years to a living author for "a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage", was first awarded to Ismail Kadaré in 2005 and then to Chinua Achebe in 2007.
The judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009 was made up of Jane Smiley, writer; Amit Chaudhuri, writer, academic and musician; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov.
A statement from the panel said: "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."
Munro, who writes regularly for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review, said she was "totally amazed and delighted" to have won the award.
In the UK, Munro is published by Vintage. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) was highly acclaimed and won the Governor General's Award, Canada's prestigious literary prize. This success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award. In 1980 The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction.
Other awards Munro has won include the Marian Engel Prize, the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award and the 1986 Governor General's Award for Fiction.
Peter Clarke, chief executive of the Man Group, added: "Since her first collection of stories was published in 1968, Alice Munro has been highly acclaimed as the contemporary master of the short fiction genre. We are delighted to honour her as the recipient of the third Man Booker International Prize."
She will receive the prize and trophy at the award ceremony on 25th June at Trinity College, Dublin.