Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who earned the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night at her home in Ontario at the age of 92. Munro's accomplishments were myriad—in addition to the Nobel, she was also honored with the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, the Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writer's Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award for her writing. But those who knew Munro reported that fame never changed the writer, who was known for being charmingly self-deprecating (she once attested that she never kept a diary, saying, “I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people”) and inviting reporters curious about her long, varied life to meet her for a few glasses of sauvignon blanc at her favorite local restaurant in Ontario.
Munro's upbringing in southwestern Ontario greatly influenced her prose style, which was characterized by small-town wisdom and Chekhovian brevity. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani once described Munro's work as creating "tales that have the scope and amplitude of novels," noting that many of the women characters created by Munro were “caught on the margins of changing cultural mores, and torn between freedom and domesticity, independence and the need to belong.” This description could also have applied to Munro, who originally turned to short stories because, as a housewife and mother to three young daughters, she didn't feel she had the time to devote to a novel.
Munro attended the University of Western Ontario, working as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk while making her way toward her two-year English and journalism degree; she and her first husband, James Munro, opened their still-popular family independent bookstore Munro's Books in Victoria, Canada in 1963. Munro remarried cartographer and geographer Gerald Fremlin in 1976. In addition to her family, Munro leaves behind 14 short-story collections, many of them filled with work that was originally published in magazines including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review. Her last, Dear Life, published in 2012, offered a kind of coda on her long and remarkable career, as well as an elliptical look at her own biography. "The final four works in this book,” she wrote in the brief foreword “are not quite stories. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.”
The loss of Munro is likely to be acutely felt by her peers in fiction, among them the author Lorrie Moore, who wore a friendship bracelet spelling out “Alice Munro” to the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Awards (an accessory that was made for Moore by the novelist and Books Are Magic owner Emma Straub). The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood has also reminisced about her friendship with Munro, recalling that she slept on the late writer's floor during a visit to Victoria in the 1960s. Writer Sheila Heti described Munro in 2013 as representing "consistency, seriousness, an uncompromising attitude, and work that is daunting, single-minded, and perfect.”
