Academy secretary Peter Englund said in an email Friday that the 82-year-old Canadian writer had declined the invitation, and that it’s not yet clear who will represent her at the Dec. 10 award ceremony.

The academy announced last week that Munro had won the $1.2 million prize for this year, and called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”

Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories since the 1960s, often focusing on the lives of girls and women from the towns and farming communities in her home region of southwestern Ontario,  The Associated Press informs.

The Swedish Academy, which awarded Ms. Munro the 8 million Swedish-kronor ($1.25 million) prize in Stockholm on Thursday, said in a brief statement that it picked the 82-year-old author because she is the “master of the contemporary short story.”

In an interview broadcast on the official Nobel Prize website, the Academy’s Permanent Secretary Peter Englund said Ms. Munro is “a fantastic portrayer of human beings.”

“One of my personal favorites is a book that came out in 2006, which is called ‘The View from Castle Rock,'” Mr. Englund said.