Author Alice Munro

The late Michael M. Rea, a publisher and collector of art and first-edition short stories, established the Rea Award in 1986 to honor a living United States or Canadian writer who has made significant contribution to the short story form. The award, the only one of its kind (exclusively for short fiction, that is), is administered by the Dungannon Foundation, a name Rea chose as a tribute to his Irish heritage, from which he is said to have drawn his love of the short story. Since its inception, however, Rea has left the judging process for the award to the discretion of three notable literary figures. This year's jurors were writers Maureen Howard, James Salter and Edmund White.

The seventy-year-old Munro, described by The New York Times as "the only living writer in the English language to have made a major career out of short fiction alone," will have a new collection of stories published by Knopf in November 2001 entitled, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Her very first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, won a Governor General's Award. Since then, she has accumulated numerous awards prior to this most recent Rea Award, including a Lannan Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.