Alice Munro Reveals Cancer Battle

Posted on October 26, 2009

At a literary event in Toronto, Man Booker Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro revealed that she has been battling cancer. She also has had heart bypass surgery. But she says she feels she's been lucky with her health, because of the availability of treatments she has had access to.

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."

Alice said that things had changed quite a bit for Canadian authors. She said that when she started writing she was told that no one wanted to hear Canadian authors talk in their own voices. She noted that "When I started to write there was a feeling you couldn't write about Canada - nobody would be interested - and there was an extraordinary, I don't know, shyness or a feeling that somehow you had to go to Europe in order to bring out your creativity."