Decorated Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for literature.

The 82-year-old becomes the 110th Nobel laureate in literature and the first Canadian-based writer to secure the honour. She also becomes only the 13th woman to receive the distinction.

Considered one of the world’s greatest living writers of short stories, Munro last published the 2012 collection “Dear Life,” which won the Ontario-born writer her third Trillium Book Award.

She has also previously won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work, as well as two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, three Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the inaugural Marian Engel Award and the American National Book Critics Circle Award.

She had been considered a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, with British-based betting company Ladbrokes positioning her as the second-most likely recipient this year behind Japanese master Haruki Murakami.

Among Munro’s celebrated works are her 1968 debut “Dance of the Happy Shades,” 1986’s “The Progress of Love,” 2004’s “Runaway” and 1978’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Past winners include such literature luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, T.S. Eliot and Toni Morrison, with the last three prizes being awarded to Chinese writer Mo Yan, Sweden’s Tomas Transtromer and Spanish scribe Mario Vargas Llosa. Canadian-born, American-raised writer Saul Bellow won in 1976.

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