Alice Munro’s daughter, Jenny Munro, will travel to Stockholm to collect her mother’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Jim Munro of Munro’s Books said Friday his former wife cannot make the trip because her health is delicate.
“She’s not well enough to go,” he said. “She’s happy. She’s not bed-ridden or anything. Just too fragile to take such a trip.”
Jenny Munro, who lives in Toronto and looks after her mother, will fly to Sweden with her partner, Dave Connelly.
Jim Munro said he is “very glad” his daughter will collect the award rather than an agent or some other representative.
At first, he said, Jenny wasn’t keen to make the trip, but changed her mind.
Jim and Alice Munro married in 1951. The couple divorced in 1972 but are on amicable terms.
On Friday, Swedish Academy secretary Peter Englund said the 82-year-old writer had declined its invitation to attend the Dec. 10 award ceremony.
The academy announced last week that Munro had won the $1.2-million prize for this year, and called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”
After the award was announced, Munro said she was delighted and “just terribly surprised.”
At the time of the announcement, Munro was visiting Victoria, where she lived during the 1960s and 1970s with Jim Munro. The couple opened Munro’s Books, a Government Street fixture.
She is the 110th Nobel laureate in literature and only the 13th woman to receive the distinction.
She’s also just the second Canadian-born author to receive the honour, after Saul Bellow in 1976. Though he was born in Lachine, Que., Bellow moved to Chicago at age eight.
Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories since the 1960s.
