The Swedish Academy says Canadian Nobel literature prize winner Alice Munro won't travel to Stockholm to collect her award because of poor health.

Academy secretary Peter Englund said in an email Friday that the 82-year-old 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 US 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.