Alice Munro was just awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this past week. Munro, a Canadian-born author, was described by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm (responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize) as “master of the contemporary short story.” Born in Wingham, Ontario, Munro published her first story while studying at the University of Western Ontario, and went on to publish her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968. She has published 14 collections of short stories over the course of her career and has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Man Booker International Prize, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and the American National Book Critics Circle Award. Munro is one of only 13 women to receive the prize, as well as the 17th to have been born in Canada. Her most recent collection entitled “Dear Life,” published in 2012, includes stories that are, as described by Munro, “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”
Check out a non-fiction essay of Munro’s published by The New Yorker about growing up in Wingham, Ontario here.
