Canadian author Alice Munro and Nobel laureate passed away at her home in Ontario at the age of 92 on Monday. She wrote short stories for more than 60 years, often focusing on life in rural Canada. She was often compared to Russian writer Anton Chekhov for the insight and compassion found in her stories.
Munro was recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013. The Nobel committee called Munro a “master of contemporary short stories”. Her first major break-through came in 1968, when her short story collection, Dance of The Happy Shades, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won Canada’s highest literary honour, the Governor General’s Award. It was the first of three Governor General’s Awards she would win in her lifetime.
In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker Prize International Prize for lifetime achievement. The judges said in a statement at the time that to read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.
Munro has published thirteen collections of stories as well as one novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories.
Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a schoolteacher, was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario. Many of her stories are set in the area and chronicle the region’s people, culture and the way of life. While pursuing higher education, Munro said she spent about half her time on academics and the other half writing.
Munro said in an interview with the Guardian in 2013 that she had been writing personal stories all her life.
Her last collection of stories, Dear Life, was published in 2012. It included a collection of partly-autobiographical stories.
