Munro, Alice

Alice Munro, nee Alice Laidlaw, short-story writer (b at Wingham, Ont 10 July 1931). Alice Munro was born and spent her early years in western Ontario farming country. She met her first husband, James Munro, at the University of Western Ontario, and after 2 years of university she moved with him to Vancouver. In 1963 they moved to Victoria, BC, and established the bookstore Munro's Books. After their marriage ended in 1972 she moved back to Ontario and then returned to the University of Western Ontario, this time as the writer-in-residence. She married Gerald Fremlin in 1976. Although Ontario has always been her home base, Munro has travelled and lived around the world.

Keywords

Born in 1931

Writers, Fiction

Munro won the GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD for her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and again in 1978 for Who Do You Think You Are?, which was also runner-up for the Booker Prize. Her many other national and international accolades include Canadian Booksellers Association Awards (1971 and 2005), the first Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1977), the inaugural Marian Engel Award (1986), two GILLER PRIZES (1998, 2004), the Rea Award (2001) for lifetime achievement in short stories, and a 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her stories have been published for decades in such renowned magazines as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. Fellow acclaimed short-story writer Cynthia Ozick said of Munro that she is "our Chekhov".

The strength of her fiction arises partially from its vivid sense of regional focus, most of her stories being set in Huron County, Ont, as well as from her sense of the narrator as the intelligence through which the world is articulated. Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms with family and small town. Her more recent work, such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004), has addressed the problems of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. Characteristic of her style is the search for some revelatory gesture by which an event is illuminated and given personal significance.

In Lives of Girls and Women, each story is organized around a metaphor whose function is to draw all the elements of the various fictional sequences into a radiant centre. Thus the death of the protagonist's Uncle Craig that occurs in "Heirs of the Living Body" is related to other deaths and envisioned as part of natural process, such that the protagonist's mother can announce that "'Uncle Craig doesn't have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!'" He, like all of Munro's characters, shares one living body, although the connections might not always be perfectly clear. The implicit connection that does not always lead to epiphanic discovery is more apparent in The Moons of Jupiter (1982), for here relationships are suggested but the threads of attachment are not always unravelled.

It is sometimes remarked that Munro's fiction is nearer to autobiography than fiction. In defence of Lives of Girls and Women, which is most frequently identified as being modelled on her life, Munro has asserted it is "autobiographical in form but not in fact." The distinction is perhaps not persuasive, but the charge is difficult to evade, for Munro's ear for the local speech has an absolute pitch, and her narrators as filters of past and present possess an intelligence that makes one feel that if it is not her life being told, then it is ours.

In many ways, furthermore, Who Do You Think You Are? may be considered a mature sequel toLives, tracing the pattern, at least, of Munro's move to the west coast and back. Dance of the Happy Shades and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), while containing some material that overlaps with experience drawn from the author's life, are carefully sequenced collections of short stories. Her collection The Progress of Love (1986) is a distillation of much of her work, exploring with increased profundity the problems of time and the narrator's relation to it, in a prose that is perfectly instinct with wonder and compassion. It also won the Governor General's Award.

The collections Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994) and The Love of a Good Woman (1998) show her continuing development as a writer and extended her fame beyond Canada's borders. In 1995 she won the W.H. Smith Award in Britain and in 1999 the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award in the US. Runaway won the 2004 Giller Prize and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Many of Munro's stories have been adapted for radio and film. The 1983 film version of one of her most anthologized stories, "Boys and Girls," won an Oscar for short film in 1986. A television movie of Lives of Girls and Women was produced in 1994. "How I Met My Husband" was dramatized as an Historica Radio Minute in 2005.

Vintage Munro, published in 2004, brings together stories spanning more than two decades of Munro's career as a writer, culled from five previous publications. Her daughter Sheila Munro has written a memoir entitled Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro ( 2002). An extensive literary biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, was published by Munro scholar Robert Thacker in 2005.

Munro, Alice
Characteristic of Munro's style is the search for some revelatory gesture by which an event is illuminated and given personal significance (photo by Jerry Baker).

Author E.D. BLODGETT

Links to Other Sites

A Conversation with Alice Munro
This Vintage Books website features an interview with Alice Munro.

Alice Munro
Search for reviews of books written by Alice Munro, Canada’s quintessential short story writer. From McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

Alice Munro
A biography of Alice Munro and a chronology of her works. A British Council website.

Historica: Alice Munro
Click on "Alice Munro" to listen to a dramatization of “How I Met My Husband.” From the Historica website.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Stories
Read this online excerpt from one of Alice Munro’s short stories. A WYNC website.

Alice Munro reveals cancer fight
A 2009 news story about Alice Munro, her bout with cancer, and recent writing projects. From thetyee.ca.

Canadian short story writer is third writer to win prize
An announcement about Alice Munro winning the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.