Canadian author Alice Munro has now added the International Booker Prize to her long list of literary accolades. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press)

Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Man Booker International Prize, an award honouring her lifetime of work.

The nearly $103,000 prize, which is awarded every two years, honours a living fiction author writing in English, or whose work is widely translated into English.

"Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels," the three-judge panel said in a statement.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

This year marks the third edition of the young prize, which was founded in 2004 and has been awarded to Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare of Albania.

Authors E.L. Doctorow, V.S Naipaul and Joyce Carol Oates were also among this year's finalists.

Munro, 77, is among the most accomplished writers on the Canadian literature scene and the author behind short story collections such as Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. She was also nominated for the international Booker in 2007.

Munro, who is originally from the small southwestern Ontario community of Wingham, has garnered praise for her tales of women living in small towns.

She is a multiple winner of both the Governor General's Literary Awards and the Giller Prize.

The Man Booker International Prize is an offshoot of the venerable Man Booker Prize, awarded annually for the best English-language novel by a writer of the Commonwealth.