> Zed Book Club / Alice Munro, One of Canada’s Literary Masters, Dies at 92
Canadian author Alice Munro is photographed at her daughter Sheila's home during an interview in Victoria, B.C, 2013, the year she won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. Photo: Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press
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Alice Munro, One of Canada’s Literary Masters, Dies at 92
Alice Munro's career spanned over four decades, during which time she earned a multitude of literary awards, including a Nobel Prize nearing the end of her writing career. / BY Andrew Wright / May 14th, 2024
Alice Munro, a master of the short story whose prose about small-town life in southwestern Ontario earned her a Nobel Prize in literature, died at the age of 92 on May 13.
Penguin Random House – which served as the author’s longtime publisher under their imprint McClelland & Stewart – said the literary icon died at home in Port Hope, Ont.
“Alice Munro is a national treasure – a writer of enormous depth, empathy, and humanity whose work is read, admired, and cherished by readers throughout Canada and around the world,” Kristine Cochrane, the CEO of McClelland & Stewart, said in a press release. “Alice’s writing inspired countless writers too, and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape.”
Her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature – which she won at 82 – saw the Swedish Academy praise her as the “master of the contemporary short story” and laud her ability to “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.” She earned several other literary honours throughout her career, including the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work, as well as two Scotiabank Giller Prizes (1998’s The Love of a Good Woman and 2004’s Runaway), three Governor General’s Literary Awards (for her 1968 debut Dance of the Happy Shades, 1978’s Who Do You Think You Are? and 1986’s The Progress of Love) and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Early on, Munro said she had a feeling that she was special. “I expected to be famous some day,” she told The Canadian Press after her Nobel win. “This is because I lived in a very small town and there was nobody who liked the same things I did, like writing, and so I just thought naturally, ‘Some day I’m going to write books,’ and it happened.”
Munro, born in Wingham, Ont., began writing short stories when she was a teenager and later decided she would devote her career to the medium because she feared she wouldn’t have enough time to write a novel as a married mother of three.
In 1951 she married Jim Munro, whom she met during her journalism and English studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved to Victoria, B.C., and had three daughters, Sheila, Jenny and Andrea. The coming years saw her juggle a busy literary career with raising her children and running a bookstore with her husband.
Her marriage came to an end in 1972, a year removed from the publication of Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of interlocking short stories that may have been the closest she came to writing a novel.
“Once I started to write that, I was off,” she told The Paris Review. “Then I made a big mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it.”
The collection – which chronicles a young girl’s growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s – contained autobiographical elements, but also was one of her many works that brought women’s issues to light. “It was just taken for granted that the stuff of women’s lives did not make literature, and I do think that has changed and I hope I had something to do with it,” Munro said in a 2009 interview.
Munro’s work was largely committed to small-town settings, but as she aged her stories changed focus, from the difficulties of adolescent girls to middle age and beyond. The Bear Came Over the Mountain, one of Munro’s most well-known stories, explores a husband’s struggle with his wife’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
“Often people say I write about ordinary people — and I don’t understand that,” she said. “But I do go on exploring the same territory, and I guess that’s just because as I get older I see it from a different angle and I never get tired of it.”
The Canadian literary legend’s final collection, 2012’s Dear Life, included four stories she described as “the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.” Although, as she told the Guardian in 2013, she put a bit of herself in everything she wrote. “In many ways I’ve been writing personal stories all my life,” she said. “I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people. When I like a story it’s because it does something … a blow to the chest.”