Munro, 78, who earlier this year was named the third recipient of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize, honouring her life's work, briefly alluded to her health Wednesday night at a sold-out literary event in Toronto. In an on-stage conversation with fellow author Diana Athill, Munro said she's had heart bypass surgery and "just had cancer."

Still, Munro said she's "been lucky with her health," unlike her mother, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at a relatively young age and died in her late 50s. "I think some of us are much luckier than others in life," she said. "I think we are lucky now in the kind of medical intervention that keeps us going."

The prize is awarded every two years to a living author whose work has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage. "I am totally amazed and delighted," Munro told Man Booker Prize officials after receiving news of her win. One of the world's most renowned short-story writers and the winner of numerous literary awards, Munro has lived in and spent much of her career writing about the lives of women in smalltown Canada. She has made an artform out of the ordinary.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before," the judging panel that included author Jane Smiley, writer Amit Chaudhuri and essayist Andrey Kurkov, said in a news release. Munro has been recognized over and over for her short-story collections - three Libris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers Association, Governor Generals awards, top fiction prize from the National Book Circle in New York for "The Love of a Good Woman", and in 1998, she won the Giller Prize for the same collection.

Her first collection of short stories, "Dance of the Happy Shades" (1968), won the Governor General's Literary Award as did her 1978 collection "Who Do You Think You Are?"