Alice Munro published more than a dozen short story collections.
Ottawa:
Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose beautifully crafted stories about the loves, ambitions and trials of small-town women in her native country made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, died Monday at the age of 92. The Globe and Mail newspaper said this on Tuesday.
According to The Globe, Munro had suffered from dementia for at least a decade, citing family members.
Munro published more than a dozen short story collections and was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
Her stories dealt with sex, desire, dissatisfaction, aging, moral conflict, and other themes in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar: villages and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario, where she lived. She was adept at fully developing complex characters within the limited pages of a short story.
Munro, who wrote clearly and realistically about ordinary people, was often compared to Anton Chekhov, the 19th-century Russian known for his brilliant short stories – a comparison that the Swedish Academy cited in honoring her with the Nobel Prize.
The Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story” and also said: “Her texts often contain images of mundane but decisive events, a kind of revelation, which illuminate the surrounding story and make existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.” “
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after winning the Nobel Prize, Munro said: “I think my stories have become quite remarkable for short stories, and I really hope that this will make people see the short story as an important art, and not as art.” just something you played with until you wrote a novel.”
Her works include: “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), “Runaway” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” (2009) and “Best Life” (2012).
The characters in her stories were often girls and women who lead seemingly unremarkable lives but struggle with trials ranging from sexual abuse and suffocating marriages to repressed love and the ravages of growing older.
Her story about a woman who begins to lose her memory and agrees to enter a nursing home, titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” from “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” was adapted into the Oscar-winning nominated film from 2006. Away From Her,” directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley.
'SHAME AND ENJOYMENT'
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, writing in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel Prize, summarized her work as follows: 'Shame and shame are driving forces for Munro's characters, just as perfectionism in writing has been a driving force for her: taking it down, to get it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro describes failure far more often than success, because failure is built into the writer's job.”
The American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in 2005: 'Reading Munro puts me in that state of silent reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I have made, the things I have done and not done, the kind of the person I am, the prospect of death.”
The short story, a style that became more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular taste—and in attracting awards. But Munro managed to provide her short stories with a wealth of plot and depth of detail that is usually more characteristic of full novels.
“For years I thought stories were just practice, until I got time to write a novel. Then I discovered that was all I could do and so I was confronted with that. I guess I was trying to process so many stories have been compensation,” Munro told the New Yorker magazine in 2012.
She was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the first with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but grew up in Chicago and was widely seen as an American writer.
Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize – Canada's most high-profile literary prize – twice.
Alice Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931 to a hard-pressed farming family in Wingham, a small town in the region of southwestern Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, and began writing in her teens.
Munro originally started writing short stories while staying at home. She planned to write a novel someday, but said with three children she could never find the time necessary. Munro began to build a reputation when her stories were published in the New Yorker in the 1970s.
She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. They had four daughters – one died just hours after birth – before divorcing in 1972. Munro then moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.
Munro revealed in 2009 that she had undergone bypass surgery and been treated for cancer.
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