Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro (/mənˈroʊ/; née Laidlaw /ˈleɪdlɔː/; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time,[1] and with integrated short fiction cycles, in which she has displayed "inarguable virtuosity".[2] Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade".[3]
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Laidlaw
10 July 1931
Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Short-story writer
English
Governor General's Award (1968, 1978, 1986)
Giller Prize (1998, 2004)
Man Booker International Prize (2009)
Nobel Prize in Literature (2013)
4
Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.[4] Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.[5] Her writing has established Munro as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov".[6] Munro has received many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story",[7] and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway.[7][8][9][10]
Early life and education[edit]
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer,[11] and later turned to turkey farming.[12] Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She is of Irish and Scottish descent; her father is a descendant of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.[13]
Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship.[14][15] During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.
Career[edit]
Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize.[16] That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published. This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award[17] and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under its international title, The Beggar Maid.[18]
From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia for public appearances and readings. In 1980 Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.
From the 1980s to 2012, Munro published a short-story collection at least once every four years. First versions of Munro's stories have appeared in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Harper's Magazine, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her collections have been translated into 13 languages.[19] On 10 October 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story".[7][8][20] She is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[21]
Munro is noted for her longtime association with editor and publisher Douglas Gibson.[22] When Gibson left Macmillan of Canada in 1986 to launch the Douglas Gibson Books imprint at McClelland and Stewart, Munro returned the advance Macmillan had already paid her for The Progress of Love so that she could follow Gibson to the new company.[23] Munro and Gibson have retained their professional association ever since; when Gibson published his memoirs in 2011, Munro wrote the introduction, and to this day Gibson often makes public appearances on Munro's behalf when her health prevents her from appearing personally.[24]
Almost 20 of Munro's works have been made available for free on the web, in most cases only the first versions.[25] From the period before 2003, 16 stories have been included in Munro's own compilations more than twice, with two of her works scoring four republications: "Carried Away" and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage".[26]
Film adaptations of Munro's short stories include Martha, Ruth and Edie (1988), Edge of Madness (2002), Away from Her (2006), Hateship, Loveship (2013) and Julieta (2016).
Personal life[edit]
She married James Munro in 1951. Their daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957, respectively; Catherine died the day of her birth due to a lack of functioning kidneys.[38]
In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. In 1966, their daughter Andrea was born. Alice and James Munro divorced in 1972.
Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario, and in 1976 received an honorary LLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met in her university days.[14] The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88.[39] Munro and Fremlin also owned a home in Comox, British Columbia.[19]
At a Toronto appearance in 2009, Munro said that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary-artery bypass surgery.[40]
In 2002, Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.[41]