The 2001 Rea Award jurors Maureen Howard, James Salter and Edmund White wrote: "For many years the Canadian writer Alice Munro has astonished her readers with stories that are magical and wise. The magic is in her art as a storyteller, in her exquisitely modulated prose -- lyrical, exacting, at time comical -- which captures the lives of her charatcers, both women and men, attempting to understand their personal histories in the larger sweep of history. Munro's configuration of time is Chekovian, supple in its bright flashes of insight, connection; shadowed in its strokes of disappointment, separation and loss. Long honored as a master of short fiction, Munro's searching narrators often draw the reader to contemplate the devices of storytelling itself, the mysterious ways in which we distort reality, reconfigure the past to avoid or embrace revelation. Munro's wisdom lies in her ability to portray the close-up, the self-dramatizing moment or limited vision then draw back for the complex and informing view. As one of her most endearing characters discovers, you can 'look up from your life of the moment and feel the world crackling beyond the walls.' In her art of the story, Alice Munro encourages us to reflect, to see our own time and place and perhaps to redeem, if not ourselves, at least our own stories in the larger setting of the world."

Jonathan Franzen has described Alice Munro as, "the best fiction writer now working in North America."

Cynthia Ozick has described Alice Munro as, "our Chekhov."

Mona Simpson has described Alice Munro as, "the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years."