Canadian writer Alice Munro, who at 82 is too frail to fly to Sweden to accept her Nobel Prize, has taped a 30-minute video in lieu of presenting the traditional formal lecture at the ceremony. In the video, which first appeared on the Nobel Prize website, Munro talk about her early interest in reading, which evolved into secret aspirations to writing.
Munro is Canada's first female to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. "You know, this is kind of a special thing with growing up as I did. If anybody read, it was the women, if anybody had the education it was often the woman; it would have been a schoolteacher or something like that, and far from being closed to women, the world of reading and writing was widely more open to women than it was to men, men being farmers or doing different kinds of work," she said. Though she wouldn't argue that women have a necessarily easier time being taken seriously as writers, Munro added that "it's much more OK now for women to be doing something important, not just fooling around with 'a little game that she does while everybody else is out of the house', but to be really serious about writing, as a man would write."
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