Alice Munro talked about getting her start in writing more than 40 years ago and shared praise about her Irish short story peers on Thursday. (CBC)

Canadian literary icon Alice Munro is being celebrated in Dublin Thursday, with the award-winning short story author set to receive the Man Booker International Prize at an evening gala.

Munro will accept the £60,000 (about $103,000 Cdn) international literary award at a ceremony at Trinity College Dublin. She is the third winner, following Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare.

The 77-year-old author, who travelled to Ireland from her home in Clinton, Ont., to accept the biennial honour, said she was thrilled to receive the prize, which recognizes a living fiction author writing in English or widely translated into English for his or her entire body of work.

"I feel great about the fact that we have many good Canadian writers ... I'm very proud to be a Canadian writer," she said on Thursday.

"Like most writers of my era, I started off thinking: 'I'll knock off a couple of short stories and get the hang of it and then I'll write a novel.' Because that's what you were supposed to do," she recalled.

"I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: 'Well, lucky I can do anything at all.' "

She also had praise for her Irish peers, saying renowned writers like Frank O'Connor, William Trevor and Edna O'Brien have inspired her to keep writing and helped with her development as an author.

Munro is among the most esteemed authors in Canadian literature — after winning some of the country's top writing honours like the Giller and the Governor General's Literary Award — as well as on the international short-fiction scene overall. Her works include Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The Booker International Prize was introduced in 2004 as an off-shoot to the main Man Booker Prize, which honours the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.