Fonds F0012 - Alice Munro fonds.

Primarily known for her exquisitely drawn narrative short stories, Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) was a critically acclaimed Canadian short-story writer who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Born July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, Munro graduated from her local district high school with the highest standing in her class in 1949. She won a two-year scholarship to the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) but left after two years of studying English and journalism due to financial constraints. At age 20, in 1951, she married her first husband, James Munro, and moved to Vancouver and then Victoria, British Columbia where the couple opened a large, independent bookstore, Munro’s Books, and raised three daughters. During this time, she began publishing her work in various magazines and literary journals such as Chatelaine and Tamarack Review. In 1951, Munro's story The Strangers was purchased to broadcast on the CBC radio program Anthology. Produced by Robert Weaver, the show is credited with championing the work of Canadian writers.

Written over a 15-year span, Munro's first collection of stories (and first book-length work) was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades netting her first Governor General's Award for fiction. Munro has received this award three times during the course of her career.

Originally conceived as a novel but developed into a series of interrelated coming-of-age stories, her work Lives of Girls and Women (1971) captured tales of her native southwestern Ontario, an uncharted and ambivalent landscape that affectionately came to be known as “Alice Munro Country.” After her first marriage ended in 1972, she returned to Ontario and settled in Clinton, near her childhood home, where she lived with her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, whom she married in 1976. (Fremlin died in April 2013.)

In 1979, Munro spoke out against banning books on CBC and in newspaper editorials after the school board in her native Huron County banned her book Lives of Girls and Women from the Grade 13 syllabus.

Her writing continued with Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My Youth (1990), and A Wilderness Station (1994). The multifaceted Open Secrets, which appeared in 1994, ranged in setting from the hills of southern Ontario to the mountains of Albania; while her dark collection The Love of a Good Woman (1998) would go on to receive both Canada’s esteemed Giller Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.

In 2004, Munro released Runaway, a Giller Prize-winning effort that explored the depths of ordinary lives through realistic reminiscences, prompting Margaret Atwood to describe her as having achieved "international literary sainthood." Published in 2007, The View from Castle Rock saw Munro once again expertly weaving history and family memoirs into quizzical fiction. Her short-story collection Too Much Happiness arrived in 2009 with Munro claiming the UK’s Man Booker International Prize that same year. She told an interviewer that Dear Life (2012), her semi-autobiographical 14th collection, would be her last, although she did go on to issue several compilations of previously published material, including Selected Stories (1996) and Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2014 (2014).

Screenplay adaptations of Munro’s short stories include “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” originally published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), which was made into the film about the domestic erosions of Alzheimer’s disease Away from Her (2006), directed by Sarah Polley. Other films based on Munro’s work include Liza Johnson’s Hateship Loveship (2013), the title story of her 2001 collection, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016), a mystery-drama movie inspired by a trio of stories — Chance, Soon and Silence from her 2004 collection Runaway. In 2015, her story Dear Life was re-imagined as a work for orchestra and soprano, by award-winning Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri, and performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

In 2013, at age 82, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro was the first Canadian—as well as the 13th woman—to be named the Nobel literature laureate, with the exception of Canadian-born American author Saul Bellow (who won the prize in 1976). The Royal Canadian Mint issued a commemorative Alice Munro coin in 2014 to celebrate her Nobel Prize win. The coin's design includes a passage from her short story Messenger. Established in honour of her many literary accomplishments, The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story (Wingham) was launched in 2015.

"It's nice to go out with a bang," Munro stated after receiving a Canadian book award for Dear Life. When she was contacted by The Canadian Press about her Nobel Prize win, Munro remarked, "I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win." The author later stated, "I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something that you played around with until you'd got a novel written."

Munro died on May 13th, 2024 in Port Hope, Ontario.

https://www.biography.com/writer/alice-munro#:~:text=Munro%20was%20born%20Alice%20Ann,first%20husband%20James%20Munro%20(m. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Munro https://www.cbc.ca/books/90-things-to-know-about-master-short-story-writer-alice-munro-1.4088507 https://nac-cna.ca/en/lifereflected/dearlife