Alice Laidlaw Munro is a writer who
grew up in Wingham, Ontario. She is a popular writer who has been on the scene
since the 1950s. Her stories all involve small rural towns and are all
collections of short stories that deal with the author’s own experiences.
She was born in 1931 to a family of farmers. In 1949, she earned a scholarship
to study at the University of Western Ontario. There she published her first
short story “Dimensions of a Shadow” in the school literary magazine known as Folio.
However, she left before she was able to graduate in order to move to
Vancouver. A decade after she dropped out, she opened and ran a book shop for
many years. In 1972, she returned to Ontario, and in 1976, due to her great use
of literature, she received an honorary degree from the University of Ontario.
Throughout her lifetime, Munro would see her work published in various journals
by the CBC. As a result, her stories were published in Atlantic Monthly and The New
Yorker, to name a few. In 1968, she collected 15 of her first ever written
stories and published them in a single volume known as Dance of the Happy Shades.
This volume, along with others, such as The Progress of Love, and Who Do You
Think You Are, all won awards, such as the Governor General’s Literary
Award for Fiction in Canada. Her book, Lives of Girls and Women, received a
Canadian Booksellers Association Award. This was later followed by Open
Secrets, which won the 1995 WH Smith Literary Award.
Many of her more modern volumes include Runaway, Too
Much Happiness, Dear Life, The View from Castle Rock, and Lying
Under the Apple Tree: New Selected Stories.
During the late ’70s to early ’80s, she traveled to many other places in the
world, such as China and Australia. This can be noted in her work, such as The Moons
of Jupiter, which was set in Australia. Due to the popularity of her
work, and the graceful way in which she wrote, she was awarded the Nobel Prize
for literature in 2013.
References:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/munro/biographical/
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/alice-munro
