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                           Alice Munro’s road to Nobel literature prize was not easy

                                         Nobel literature prize winner Alice Munro.

Alice Munro has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature, thus becoming its 13th female recipient. It’s a thrilling honour for a major writer: Munro has long been recognised in North America and the UK, but the Nobel will draw international attention, not only to women’s writing and Canadian writing, but to the short story, Munro’s chosen literary genre and one often neglected.

The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro. She found herself referred to as “some housewife”, and was told that her subject matter, being too “domestic”, was boring. A male writer told her she wrote good stories, but he wouldn’t want to sleep with her. “Nobody invited him,” said Munro. Maybe as a consequence of this initial reaction towards her, when writers occur in Munro stories, they are pretentious, or exploitative of others; or they’re being asked by their relatives why they aren’t famous, or – worse, if female – why they aren’t better-looking.

The chances that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero. Munro was born in 1931, and thus experienced the Depression as a child and the Second World War as a teenager. This was in south-western Ontario, Canada, a region that also produced equally talented writers and poets such as Robertson Davies, Graeme Gibson, James Reaney, and Marian Engel. It’s this small-town setting that features most often in her stories – the snobberies, the eccentrics, and the jeering at ambitions, especially artistic ones.

Shame is a common driving force for Munro’s characters just as perfectionism in the writing and courage in her profession have been driving forces for her.

As in much else, Munro is essentially Canadian. Faced with the Nobel, she will be modest, she won’t get a swelled head. The rest of us, on this magnificent occasion, will just have to do that for her.

Sustainable flight

   TAM was the first airline in South America to carry out an experimental flight using biofuel on November 22, 2010. Produced from the oil of 100% domestic nettlespurge, known in Portuguese as pinhão-manso, it reduces carbon emissions by between 65% and 80% compared with petroleum-derived kerosene, according to research. Besides, the plant does not threatens the food chain, as it is not edible for humans nor animals. “Compared with other biofuels, the fuel from this plant is very promising for the Brazilian scenario,” says Paulus Figueiredo, TAM’s fuel manager. The next step in the project is to implement a farming unit, in reduced scale, at TAM’s Technological Center in São Carlos (SP), exclusively to conduct studies and make better cultivation techniques viable. “The objective is to carry out studies concerning technical and economic viability to build a biofuel Brazilian platform based on nettlespurge,” explains TAM’s CEO, Líbano Barroso. The experimental flight was a joint effort between TAM, Airbus, CFM International (joint venture between U.S.’s GE and the French Safran Group) and Air BP. The trip was authorized by Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) and by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

(TAM News, January 2011. Adaptado.)