MAN BOOKER INTL - DISCUSSION EVENT, DUBLIN

This from today's Irish Times:

How was the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro selected as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009? All will be revealed at a public event in Trinity College Dublin at 12.30pm on Thursday, June 25th, just hours before the award is made at a gala dinner that night in the college. At the event the three judges – Jane Smiley, Amit Chaudhuri and Andrey Kurkov – will discuss their choice under the chairmanship of Colm Tóibín, who was a judge of the 2007 award.

“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short-story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels,” say the judges, who will elaborate more in Trinity on how they picked her from a list that included Peter Carey, James Kelman and Joyce Carol Oates.

Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, has a writing career stretching back 40 years, since the publication of Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories in 1968 .

The panel discussion is free. Tickets can be booked at www.tcd.ie/library/booker