Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel Prize-winning master of spare short stories that explored what she called “the complexity of things – the things within things,” has died at age 92.
She died Monday night in Ontario, according to an announcement in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail confirmed by her family. Munro had been suffering from dementia for more than a decade.
The critic and novelist Cynthia Ozick once hailed Munro as “our Chekhov,” referring to the great Russian short story writer.
In October 2013, Munro was named the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which has been awarded since 1901. As arguably the most accessible and popular of modern Nobel winners, Munro’s selection was widely celebrated by readers and other writers. Salman Rushdie called Munro “a true master.”
Her 14 published collections of stories, which often move back and forth in time and alternate between memory and reality, are largely set in small-town and rural Ontario, where Munro lived and which she knew so well. They often featured girls and women dealing with love and lies, dreams and death, among other universal issues of daily life.
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On small canvases (her catalog is extensive, but she never wrote a novel), she managed to create deeply revealing psychological portraits without judging her characters.
In a 2012 review of Munro’s last collection, “Dear Life,” USA TODAY’s Claudia Puig called the stories “spare, graceful and beautifully crafted.” “Dear Life” included four autobiographical pieces which Munro described as “not quite stories … and the closest things I have to say about my own life.”
In a 2009 review of “Too Much Happiness,” USA TODAY’s Deirdre Donahue wrote, “Munro can still teach younger writers how to write marvelously muscular short fiction. These stories have more plot and energy than most novels.”
Published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines, Munro’s stories were included in “Best American Short Stories” and the O. Henry Awards.
Her story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was adapted as the 2006 film “Away From Her,” starring Julie Christie.
Born July 10, 1931, in Wingham Ontario, Munro, the daughter of a mink farmer and a school teacher, knew she wanted to be a writer when still in her teens. She told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 she was a “weird” teenager. “I was already deep into being a writer. I went to a dance. Nobody danced with me. This bewildered and annoyed me. I never went to a dance again.”
She published her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” in 1950 while still a journalism student at the University of Western Ontario. She also worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker and a library clerk.
She wrote while raising three daughters (a fourth died within a day of her birth). She also helped her first husband, James Munro, run a bookstore in Victoria. Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,”was released in 1968, when she was 37.
“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”
She went on to win the top Canadian literary prize, the Governor General’s Award for fiction, three times, starting with “Death of the Happy Shades.” She also won a National Book Critics Circle prize for “The Love of a Good Woman” in 1998 and the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work in 2009.
In June 2013, two months after the death of her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, Munro told the Canadian newspaper The National Post she was retiring. “Not that I didn’t love writing,” she said, “but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you’re my age, you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It’s like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable.”
After the Nobel Prize was announced, Munro, citing health reasons, said she was unable to travel to Sweden to give the traditional victory lecture and to accept the $1.2 million prize in person.
In a statement, she called the Nobel “so surprising and wonderful. I am dazed by all the attention and affection that has been coming my way.”
She added, “When I began writing there was a very small community of Canadian writers and little attention was paid by the world. Now Canadian writers are read, admired and respected around the globe. I’m so thrilled to be chosen as (a) Nobel Prize for Literature recipient. I hope it fosters further interest in all Canadian writers. I also hope that this brings further recognition to the short story form.”
Former USA TODAY book critic Bob Minzesheimer died in 2016.
