Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies at 92

Munro was the acclaimed author of short story collections like ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ and ‘Dear Life’

Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-winning writer best known for her short stories, has died. She was 92.

Munro's family confirmed the author's death to The Globe and Mail on May 13. Munro had suffered from dementia for over 10 years, and died at her Ontario care home.

Munro was born in Ontario, Canada in 1931. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlow, was a fox farmer and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw, was a schoolteacher. Munro was the eldest of three children, and had a younger brother, born in 1936, and a younger sister born in 1937. She was an avid reader as a child, and cited writers like Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor as influences.

Munro began writing fiction as a teenager, publishing her first short story in 1950, before attending the University of Western Ontario to study English and journalism. She often drew from her own background for inspiration, featuring elements like her father's fox farm and her mother's Parkinson's disease in her writing.

"One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it because then you can say, well obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school," Munro told The Guardian in 2013 about being a writer from her hometown. "You have no idea of the competition."

Munro published her first short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968, which won Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. Her 1978 collection, Who Do You Think You Are? also won the prize that year. In later years, Munro published the short story collections The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Runaway (2004) and Dear Life (2012), among others.

The author's work was considered revolutionary for the short story canon. Munro's writing tended to incorporate jumps in time, her native Ontario and a focus on relationships. Many of her stories also centered on girls coming of age, such as 1964's "Boys and Girls," about a young girl's examination of gender roles both in and outside the home.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that," Munro told The New Yorker of her writing in 2012. "I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation."

Dear Life, one of her most notable collections, was comprised of stories that Munro wrote over the course of her lifetime, and earned her the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel," Munro told The New York Times of winning the coveted prize. The Love of a Good Woman, won the 1998 Giller Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.

Several of Munro's works also found life in other mediums. Runaway was the basis for the 2016 Spanish film Julieta. Another short story of hers, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage was adapted into 2013’s Hateship, Loveship, which starred Hailee Steinfeld and Kristin Wiig.

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Munro married husband James Munro in 1951 and they got divorced in 1972. The couple had daughters Sheila, Catherine, Jenny and Andrea; Catherine died the day she was born from kidney failure. Eldest daughter Shiela penned a memoir in 2008 titled Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro about her mother. James originally worked in a managerial position before the family opened the independent bookstore Munro’s Books, which still operates today. In 1976, Munro married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, who died in 2013.

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