Canadian writer Alice Munro won this year's Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy, which selects Nobel literature winners, called her a "master of the contemporary short story."

She's the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976 and left for the U.S. as a boy.

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Munro's writing has brought her numerous awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.

Often compared to Anton Chekhov, the 82-year-old writer has attained near-canonical status as a thorough, but forgiving, documenter of the human spirit.

Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.

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In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the '60s as "wonderful."

It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said.

Last year's Nobel literature award went to Mo Yan of China.

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The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday.