Nobel laureate Alice Munro (July 10, 1931-May 13, 2024) was one of the world's most highly-esteemed short story writers. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel Prize, in 2013, and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. The Swedish academy pronounced her a "master of the contemporary short story" who could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages."
While majoring in journalism at the University of Western Ontario, she sold a story about a lonely teacher, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," to CBC Radio, and published work in her school's literary journal. Her debut collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," was released in 1968; it won the Governor's General Award and made Munro a national celebrity.
Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter-of-fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. Among her most acclaimed works were "The Beggar Maid," "The Children Stay," "Dance of the Happy Shades," "Family Furnishings," "Lives of Girls and Women," "The Love of a Good Woman," "Miles City, Montana," "The Moons of Jupiter," and "Runaway."
Her story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," in which a married woman with memory loss has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, was adapted by Sarah Polley for the 2006 feature film "Away from Her," which starred Oscar-nominee Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in "Hateship, Loveship," an adaptation of Munro's "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage."
Her 2009 collection "My Best Stories," with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, contained 17 stories chosen by Munro. Her last book was the 2012 collection "Dear Life."
Munro's honors included Britain's Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor's General Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.
Munro would acknowledge that she didn't think like a novelist. "I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people's lives," she told the AP. "That was one of the problems, why I couldn't write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well."