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.
"Alice Munro is often able to say more in 30 pages than an ordinary
novelist is capable of in 300. She is a virtuoso of the
elliptical . . . the master of the contemporary short story. . .
. Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the
greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices."
—The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 - Presentation Speech
“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri
“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom
I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.” —Jonthan
Franzen
“The authority she brings to the page is just
lovely.” —Elizabeth Strout
“She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender,
the most honest, the most perceptive.” —Jeffery Eugenides
“Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no
other writer can.”—Julian Barnes
“She is a short-story writer who…reimagined what a story can
do.” —Loorie Moore
“There’s probably no one alive who’s better at the craft of the
short story.” —Jim Shepard
“A true master of the form.” —Salman Rushdie
“A wonderful writer.” —Joyce Carol Oates
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