• Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of history’s most honoured short story writers, passed away in Port Hope, Ontario. She was 92.

• Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

• She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

‘Canada’s Chekhov’

• Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931. 

• Her father was a fox and mink farmer and her mother was a teacher. 

• Munro began writing as a teenager. She also studied at the University of Western Ontario and worked as a library clerk. 

• Munro dedicated her literary career almost exclusively to the short story genre. 

• She grew up in a small Canadian town, the kind of environment that often provides the backdrops for her stories. These often accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages. 

• The underlying themes of her work are often relationship problems and moral conflicts. The relationship between memory and reality is another recurring theme she uses to create tension. 

• With subtle means, she was able to demonstrate the impact that seemingly trivial events can have on a person's life.

• Munro, who wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realism, was often likened to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian known for his brilliant short stories, a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in honoring her with the Nobel Prize in 2013.

• She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel 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”.

• Her debut collection, ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’, was released in 1968. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity.

Her other works include:

• Lives of Girls and Women (1971)

• Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)

• The Moons of Jupiter (1982)

• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)

• Runaway (2004)

• The View from Castle Rock (2006)

• Too Much Happiness (2009)

• Dear Life (2012).

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