Munro, Alice (1931-2024), a Canadian short-story writer, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. Munro’s fiction excels in revealing the larger and darker meanings in seemingly ordinary events. She describes a fractured and changing world, in which characters search for ways to unify their experiences. In 2009, Munro received the Man Booker International Prize, now called the International Booker Prize, for her works. The prize is given as a lifetime achievement award for fiction published in English or available in English translation.
Munro was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario. Her given and family name was Alice Ann Laidlaw. She was married to James Munro from 1951 to 1976. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), explores life in a fictional small Ontario town similar to the one in which she was born and raised. Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a series of linked stories. The book follows Del Jordan from her childhood through a series of crises she experiences in religion, sex, and art.
Many of Munro’s later stories depict the complications of marriage and the difficulties her characters encounter in knowing their own motivations. They have been collected in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, published in the United States as The Beggar Maid), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), The Progress of Love (1986), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), The View from Castle Rock (2006), and Dear Life (2012). Her Selected Stories was published in 1996. A later collection, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, was published in 2014. Munro died on May 13, 2024.
