There was a collective holding of breath waiting for the Noble Prize announcements to be made. Then there was a collective literary roar as one of the world’s foremost experts in short story writing was the thirteenth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Alice Munro’s body of work examines the delicate balance in our relationships, exposing the way our lives expand and contract around the people within them. It could not have gone to a more deserving writer.

Her most recent collection of stories, Dear Life, is said to be her last. With it, Munro retires with volumes of beautiful work. Her stories are the kind to read and reread, the sort you grow old with. This is a wonderful day for short story writers, for women in the field, and for literature as a whole. Congratulations to Alice Munro.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”