Comprehensive information and links about Alice Munro

Alice Munro on July 10, 1931Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer, widely considered one of the greatest short story writers in modern literature.

Biography

Alice Munro was born in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario into a family of fox and poultry farmers. Her father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, a school teacher, was named Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney). She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," while a student at the University of Western Ontario in 1950. During this education she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, in which she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry James Munro and move to Vancouver. Her daughters Sheila and Jenny were born in 1953 and 1957 respectively. In 1963 she moved to Victoria and established Munro Books with her husband. In 1966, her third daughter, Sarah was born.

Her first collection of stories, , was not published until 1968, but was highly acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General's Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. This success was followed by (1971), a collection of interlinked stories that was published as a novel.

She and James Munro were divorced in 1972 when she returned to Ontario to become Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario. She married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, in 1976 and they moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, where they currently live.

In 1978, Munro's in American editions); this book led Munro to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for a second time. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980 she held the position of Writer-in-Residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980's and 1990's Munro published a short-story collection about once every four years to increasing acclaim, winning both national and international awards ( Works and Awards and honours below).

In 2002, her daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir,

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small town settings to American writers of the rural South. As in the writing of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. However, the reaction of Munro's characters is less intense than their southern counterparts. Thus, particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the essence of everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.

A frequent theme of her work has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.

Munro's spare and lucid language and command of detail gives her fiction a "remarkable precision," as Helen Hoy observes. Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.[1] As Thacker (1998) notes:

In addition, Munro has published three "best of" volumes, collecting stories previously published in the above-noted books:

Alice Munro is that rare Canadian whose fame abroad matches the admiration she enjoys in Canada. She is the only person to have won the Governor General's Award three times, for (1986). She has won the WH Smith Literary Award in the U.K.; the National Book Critics Circle Award and the O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement in Short Fiction in the U.S.; the PENMalamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction; the Rea Award for the Short Story; the Trillium Book Award and the Libris Award. She has also won the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, the Canadian Booksellers Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional Award for Canada and the Caribbean.

In 1986 she was awarded the Marian Engel Award for her of work. In 1993 she was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal.

On November 11, 2004, Munro won the Giller Prize for her short story collection .

Munro received the Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club in February 2005. The award, given annually for a of work of literary excellence was presented to Munro was at a ceremony in New York hosted by novelist Russell Banks that included tributes by former winner Margaret Atwood and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham [3]