The winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro, has died. The Canadian author became famous for her short stories – she was called “the master of short prose” and “the Canadian Chekhov”. She had been suffering from dementia for over a decade. She died at the age of 92 in a nursing home in Ontario.
Alice Munro, an outstanding Canadian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died. She was called “Canadian Chekhov”.
Born on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Munro’s work focused on stories about seemingly ordinary people, most often women, living in small towns in Canada. She started writing her first collections while her little daughters were sleeping – she wrote short texts because it was too difficult to concentrate on longer forms.
Munro’s stories began to be published in magazines such as Tamarack Review, Montreal and Canadian Forum. The first collection was published in 1968 and was hailed by The New York Times as “proof that short stories are alive and well” .
It was only later that the writer’s work began to receive favorable reviews from critics and international recognition. It won a number of international awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Interestingly, in that year British bookmakers announced a “sure win” to the Japanese writer Murakami.
Alice Munro became famous as a writer of short stories included in the collections, among others: “Dance of Happy Shadows”, “Loves, Likes, Respects”, “Dear Life” and “Who Do You Think You Are?” Her work has been translated into over 20 languages.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Munro explained that she “has been writing personal stories all my life.”
Source: The Guardian
