Alice Munro's Nobel win shows the short story is in rude health Shall we begin to list the many reasons to cheer about Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? That it is a long-overdue accolade for a wonderful writer who happens to be only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901? That even though she has already won the Man Booker International in 2009, she is an author who deserves the widest possible audience? Indubitably. That the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, unable to reach Munro by phone, left a message on her answer machine. Hilariously, yes. But when we have finished cheering for all those reasons, let us also give a small hurrah that the big gong has gone to one of the very best proponents of that fine and often underrated art, the short story, a fictional form that is now having an undisputed renaissance. For many years short story experts such as William Trevor, Helen Simpson and Munro herself, have been producing quietly brilliant volumes that received adulatory reviews and modest sales - but along with the explosion of creative writing classes in universities, publishers and newspapers have come to a recognition that it is the ideal form for new writers to experiment as well as established ones to show their chops. Only two days before the announcement of Munro's Nobel win, Sarah Hall received the top prize of £15,000 for the BBC Short Story Award, narrowly beating the newcomer Lucy Wood, whose work appeared here in the Telegraph when we launched our very own Short Story Club. As a successful novelist, Hall could have long left the form behind if she chose, but her latest book was The Beautiful Indifference, a much-lauded story collection. What makes this form so enduring is more than its useful brevity, perfectly appropriate to the age of e-readers as it is: in a few thousand words, an author can portray a whole cosmos of large ideas. As Munro has put it: "There are no such things as big and little subjects. The major things, the evils, that exist in the world have a direct relationship to the evil that exists around a dining room table when people are doing things to each other. In the same way that Anton Chekhov could show us the whole of Russia in one country home, Munro has told us universal truths about human nature in her tales of small-town life, often as it is lead by unremarkable young women, in rural Ontario. After her most recent collection, the brilliantly entitled Dear Life, Munro claimed it would be her last, shyly admitting to the autobiographical nature of the final pieces in it, the nearest she would get, she said, to writing a memoir. It reminded her readers that a short story at its finest can be many things, memoir, novel and poem all rolled into one and it is a form in rude health: hooray! Read an exclusive short story by Alice Munro