Alice Munro made history this morning, being the first Canadian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Munro, 82, is known for focusing her writing on short stories—one reason that her work may have been overlooked in the past for the Nobel Prize.

But her age has not slowed down her writing or made her filter her imagination, although this July she did announce that she will be retiring after finishing her current book, Dear Life.

Her writing is often tinged with a dark violent side, centred on the domestic scene, like the stories in her collection “Too Much Happiness”, in which family members murder each other and two children encourage each other to physically hurt themselves.

She is the 110th Nobel Laureate in literature and the 13th woman to have won the award. Past winners of the award include authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, T.S. Eliot and Toni Morrison.

While we may know that there is no lack of Canadian—and Canadian women—writers that are both talented and widely read, there is just that extra cred that winning such a prestigious award brings.

And lets not forget that aside from the honour of making literary and national history, the award comes with a cushy sum of about C$1.3 million for the author.