ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as
Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel,
Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including
Who Do You Think You Are?;
The Moons of Jupiter;
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie,
Away from Her;
Runaway; and
The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in
The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, and
The Paris Review.
In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for
Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with
The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection,
Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others.
Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024.
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