Alice Munro (1931 - 2024) was a Canadian author who wrote almost exclusively in the short story form and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 as a master of the contemporary short story. [1] Her fiction is set largely in the small towns of southwestern Ontario and follows ordinary lives, usually those of girls and women, across decades within the span of a single story. [2] She also received the International Booker Prize, three Governor General's Awards and two Giller Prizes.
Early life and education
Alice Ann Laidlaw was born on 10 July 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, where her father raised foxes and mink and her mother had been a schoolteacher. [1] The family's straitened circumstances and her mother's Parkinson's disease, which she nursed as a teenager, supplied material she returned to throughout her career.
She won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where she studied journalism and English and published her first story in 1950, but left after two years when the funding ran out. [2] She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to British Columbia, where the couple raised three daughters and opened the bookshop Munro's Books in Victoria.
Writing career
Munro wrote in the intervals of domestic work for two decades before her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, appeared in 1968 and won the Governor General's Award. [1] Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a linked sequence often read as a novel, followed, and further Governor General's Awards came for Who Do You Think You Are? and The Progress of Love.
Her marriage ended in 1972 and she returned to Ontario, marrying the geographer Gerald Fremlin in 1976 and settling in Clinton, near the country of her childhood. [2] From 1977 her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, which gave her a large American readership. Later collections included The Moons of Jupiter, Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway and Dear Life, which she said in 2012 would be her last book.
Style
Munro's stories compress the material of a novel into thirty or forty pages, moving without warning across years and reversing the reader's understanding of a character late in the narrative. [3] The settings are deliberately unremarkable: kitchens, farms, hotels and secondhand shops in Huron County, rendered with attention to social gradation and to the constraints of class and sex on Canadian women of the mid-twentieth century.
Critics have compared her reach within the form to Chekhov, and her insistence that the short story is a complete rather than a preparatory form influenced a generation of writers. [4] "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", about a woman entering care with dementia, was filmed by Sarah Polley as Away from Her.
Later life and posthumous disclosures
Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013; in poor health, she did not travel to Stockholm and was represented at the ceremony by her daughter. [1] She died on 13 May 2024 at Port Hope, Ontario, aged ninety-two, having had dementia in her final years.
In July 2024 her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner disclosed publicly that Fremlin had sexually abused her as a child and that Munro, informed of it, had remained with him. [4] Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005 and received a suspended sentence; he died in 2013. The disclosure prompted extensive reassessment of Munro's life and of the treatment of silence, complicity and family secrecy in her fiction. [2]
