We cannot really claim Anne Tyler, those of us in the Twin Cities who love and admire her work. Yes, she was born in Minneapolis, but she moved away as a baby and is really a Baltimore writer. Baltimore is where she has lived most of her life, and Baltimore is where all 19 of her wonderful novels are set.

Still, as the place of her birth, we can quietly feel just a teeny bit proud when we hear, as we did today, that she is the winner of the 2012 Sunday Times (of London) Award for Literary Excellence.

She'll go to London--her first trip the UK--in April to receive the award and to be interviewed by the chief fiction critic of the London Times.

(So now I'm wishing that the Strib had an award for excellence, or, at the very least, a chief fiction critic.)

Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 (and was a finalist twice before that) for "Breathing Lessons," a story of a difficult but enduring marriage. All of her novels are rather homey, in a way, dealing with quirky people struggling with life. You might know "The Accidental Tourist," which was a lovely movie starring Geena Davis and William Hurt, but if you haven't read the book, you should. It was a good movie, but it's a terrific book.

Her latest novel, "The Beginner's Goodbye," is her 19th book; it's about a widower learning to rebuild his life after the death of his wife. It will be published in April and--this just in--will be excerpted in the next issue of Granta Magazine. It will be on the newstands in the U.S. on Feb. 7.

Anne Tyler.

Previous winners of the Times award include Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, and Britsh writers Anthony Burgess, John le Carre, and Muriel Spark.