Alice Munro, a Canadian author who was revered worldwide as master of the short story and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 92.
Her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, said Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ont., on Monday evening.
“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,” the publisher’s CEO, Kristin Cochrane, said in a statement confirming Munro’s death.
“Alice’s writing inspired countless writers too, and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape.”
Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ont., on July 10, 1931. The eldest child of Robert and Anne Laidlaw, she was raised on what she described as a “collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm.” She began writing short stories when she was a teenager and later devoted her career to the medium because, as a married mother of three, she didn’t believe she had the time to complete novels.
Alice Munro talks to Midday host Tina Srebotnjak about the craft of writing fiction.
She wrote 14 acclaimed collections, seamlessly blending ordinary people with extraordinary themes — womanhood, restlessness, aging — to develop complex characters with the nuance and depth most writers can only find in the wider confines of a novel.
Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy hailed Munro, then 82, as “master of the contemporary short story.”
In an interview with CBC after her win, Munro said: “I think my stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and 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.”
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Munro won a litany of literary awards and prizes, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards, two Giller Prizes and the Man Booker International Prize.
Her rich portrayals of the human condition led to a decades-long publishing relationship with the New Yorker magazine, cementing the Canadian author’s status with an elite group of contributors who defined the American magazine’s celebrated relationship with short fiction.
Munro opened Munro’s Books in Victoria in 1963. She credits the bookstore, which made $175 on its first day and still operates today, as helping her overcome the writer’s block she experienced from her mid-20s to her mid-30s: “The writing ceased to be this all-important thing that I had to prove myself with. The pressure came off.”
More to come.
Source Agencies
