Alice Munro was a Nobel Prize-winning short story author whose acclaimed work focused on womanhood and rural living.
- Died: May 13, 2024 (Who else died on May 13?)
- Details of death: Died in Ontario at the age of 92.
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Alice Munro’s legacy
Alice Munro grew up in rural Wingham, Ontario; her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher. Her mother exposed her to books from an early age, and her love of reading quickly turned into a love of writing, too. She published her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” while attending the University of Western Ontario. She married James Munro; the pair eventually moved from West Vancouver, British Columbia to Victoria, British Columbia, where they opened Munro’s Books, a bookstore that is still open today.
Her focus was mainly on short stories, and it was her first collection, 1968’s “Dance of the Happy Shades,” that finally gave her success as a writer. It won Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, and ended up being the first in a long series of collections, over a dozen in all. She published an anthology of work every few years between 1968 and 2012, after which she largely retired from writing. Her work has been adapted into film, including the 2006 Oscar-nominated movie, “Away from Her,” which was based on Munro’s short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”
Munro won the Governor General’s Award two more times – in 1978 and 1986 – in addition to a long string of other awards. They include the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1995, the Giller Prize in 1998 and 2004, the 1999 Libris Award for Author of the Year and Book of the Year, and more. In 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro has also been honored with a Canadian postage stamp, the Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club, the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal, and other accolades.
Notable quote
“Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic … Books were so important to me. They were far more important than life.” — Interview with The Guardian, 2003
Tributes to Alice Munro
Full obituary: The New York Times
