Nobel prize-winning author Alice Munro has been cited by the Swedish Academy as “a master of the contemporary short story." She was the first to win the Nobel Prize in Literature as a pure short story writer and has published 14 original short-story collections and several short-story compilations.
Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada on July 10, 1931, the daughter of an animal farmer and school teacher. She began writing as a teenager and her first short story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," was published in 1950. At the time, she was studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario and worked as a waitress, tobacco picker, and library clerk. She left in 1951 to marry her husband, Bob.
Munro endured years of rejection from publishers and was often limited by her responsibilities to marriage and motherhood. However, it was frequently these responsibilities that were reflected in her writing. Her works carry an emotional density, exploring the everyday lives of men and women in her native southwestern Ontario, dubbed “Munro Country.” Often, her stories revolve around mothers and daughters and explore the ins and outs of growing up and falling in love. She showcases both the beautiful and tragic sides of life, writing with a depth and nuance that makes a thirty-page short story feel like an entire novel.
When Munro’s first collection of short stories, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published in 1968, it received great acclaim and won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize. More success followed with “Lives of Girls and Women” and “Who Do You Think You Are?,” which garnered her a second Governor General’s Award.
From the 1980s to 2012, Munro published a short-story collection at least once every four years. Later volumes included “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” “Friend of My Youth,” “A Wilderness Station,” and “The Love of a Good Woman.” Along the way, she was constantly rewriting and revising, and many of her stories have variant versions. “Dear Life” was her last collection of stories and was published in 2012.
In addition to the Governor General’s Award and the Nobel Prize in Literature, Munro has been the recipient of many other awards, including a Giller Prize, a Libris Award, and the Man Booker International Prize.