Alice Munro is a literary treasure. She has stuck to the short story form and mastered it to the admiration of a worldwide audience.
Munro was born Alice Laidlaw and grew up in southern Ontario, an area she has used as a setting for her stories. After marrying James Munro, she moved to Vancouver, then to Victoria, where they founded Munro's Books, still one of the surviving independent booksellers.
Munro was living in the west when she published her first short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968, and followed it with Lives of Girls and Women in 1971. She later returned to Ontario, where she was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in London. She remarried and continued to publish: another dozen collections of short stories appeared at a steady pace. Her latest collection, Too Much Happiness, is reviewed here in the New York Times.
The honours piled up. In Canada alone, Alice Munro has received two Gillers and three Governor General's awards. She has also received the O. Henry prize, the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Canada-Australia literary prize. In 2009 she was honoured with the Man Booker International prize for lifetime achievement.
Fellow-writer Margaret Atwood published a celebration of her work in The Guardian, referring to her "devoted international readership" and calling her a major writer of English fiction. Munro's work has been widely translated and anthologized.
Her stories have also been adapted for film. Notably, Sarah Polley's Away from Her (2006) was an adaptation of a Munro story.
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