Alice Munro was a Canadian author who won the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in 2013. She has often been compared to Russian writer Anton Chekhov for her short stories set in rural Canada.
Alice Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, to a fox farmer and a schoolteacher. Her early life in Wingham influenced much of her writing, chronicling the region's people, culture, and way of life. Munro excelled in school, becoming class valedictorian and earning a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where she studied English.
She published several Canadian periodicals and broadcast her stories on CBC during the 1950s and 1960s. Her first breakthrough came in 1968 with the publication of her short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. This collection, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. Munro won the Governor General's Award three times in her career.
Munro's work often explored the contrast between life before and after the social revolution of the 1960s. "Having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said. Her stories depicted the changes and challenges faced by women during this period.
In 1977, the New Yorker published Munro's story, Royal Beatings, which detailed punishments she received from her father as a child. This story marked the beginning of a long relationship with the publication. Munro's only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, was published in 1971, but she was primarily known for her short stories.
One of her well-known stories, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, was adapted into the 2006 film Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. Like many of Munro's works, it dealt with complex human relationships and emotions.
Munro's later collections, such as Too Much Happiness, The View from Castle Rock, and The Love of a Good Woman, continued to receive critical acclaim. She retired from writing with her final collection, Dear Life (2012).
Throughout her career, Munro received numerous accolades. In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement. The judges stated, "To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time, that you never thought of before." In 2013, Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first lifelong Canadian to win the prize and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. The Nobel Committee called her a "master of contemporary short story."
Alice Munro passed away at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on a Monday night. She was 92 years old.
Kristin Cochrane, CEO of Penguin Random House Canada, said, "Alice Munro is a national treasure — a writer of enormous depth, empathy, and humanity whose work is read, admired, and cherished by readers throughout Canada and worldwide."
