Alice Munro, winner of this year's Nobel prize in literature, has said that she is unable to travel to Sweden to give the traditional victory lecture and to accept the £780,000 prize in person, citing health reasons.

Munro, who is 82 years old, said earlier this year that she wanted to retire, after a glittering career in which she has written 14 acclaimed short-story collections.

In June, she told Canada's National Post: "[It's] not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable."

Munro's most recent collection, Dear Life (2012), included four autobiographical pieces which the author described as "not quite stories … the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life".

Swedish Academy permanent secretary Peter Englund confirmed on Friday that Munro has declined an invitation to the prize-giving, and said it is not yet known who will represent her at the ceremony on 10 December.

The winner of the Nobel prize in literature traditionally gives a lecture in Stockholm before accepting the award, but Munro joins a string of past winners unable to attend for health reasons.

Doris Lessing, who was 87 when she won the prize in 2007, was advised by doctors not to travel, because of back trouble, and the Nobel Foundation came to London to award the prize instead.

Harold Pinter, then 75, didn't go in 2005, citing poor health, and Austria's Elfriede Jelinek declined the year before that, saying that she was "not in a mental state to withstand such ceremonies".

Announcing the award, Englund described Munro as the "master of the contemporary short story", with a "power of observation that is almost uncanny" and an "intelligence and power of observation that could be a bit problematic, because she sees through people".