One of the pleasures of being a Canadian in Europe in October was to walk by the newsstands and see a smiling Alice Munro on the front pages of all the foreign-language papers. You wanted to tell the person next to you, "she won the Nobel Prize and she's one of us."
Speaking of being "one of us," the book publisher Howard White has blogged over at the Encyclopedia of BC site that while she is usually called an Ontario writer, Ms Munro actually has a long relationship with my native province, British Columbia.
"It is seldom mentioned that she lived for 22 years in British Columbia," Howard writes, "formed many of her deepest associations in BC, launched her career here and wrote some of her most memorable stories about her BC experience as a young wife and mother struggling to become a writer."
Not that we're competitive. Just sayin'.