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 confirmed her death to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
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.
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.”
More to come.
Alice Munro talks to Midday host Tina Srebotnjak about the craft of writing fiction.