Alice Munro
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“Theconversation Subtle, engrossing, of kisses. fearless, transforming .” Alice Munro
Ms Munro is the first Canadian and only the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, the world’s most prestigious literary prize for lifetime achievement. The Nobel is given to a writer for a lifetime’s body of work, rather than a single novel, short story or collection. The winner receives eight million Swedish Krona or, about USD1.2 million. Winners of the Noble Prize for Literature in recent years have included Mo Yan of China, in 2012; the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, in 2011; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer in 2010.
Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, the eldest of three children. Ms Munro’s father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, raised silver foxes and minks and worked as a watch-man before turning to farming. Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), Munro’s mother, was a teacher. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in 1959.
Ms Munro was expected to continue the farming business, but when she was 12, she resolved to become a writer. She won herself a scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario. “The Dimensions of a Shadow”, her first published story, appeared in Folio, the student literary magazine, when Ms Munro was an eighteen-year-old freshman.
“It’s just life. You can’t beat life.” Alice Munro
Alice Laidlaw left Western after only two years. Her scholarship was for two years and she simply had no more money to continue. Shortly afterwards, she married James Munro. The couple settled in Vancouver and she became a mother at 21. Three more children came along. All the while, Ms Munro was writing, sneaking an hour here and there while the babies napped or while dinner cooked. As she once told an interviewer, there was housework to be done as well as reading. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’connor and Carson Mccullers were early influences, and she frequently mentions William Maxwell as a defining literary love. In the early 1960s, the family moved to Victoria, where Munro, with her husband, founded a successful bookstore.
It was not until 1968, that her first collection of short stories was published by Ryerson Press. She was 37 years old. “I never intended to be a short-story writer,” Ms Munro once said. The collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, was awarded Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award. Several of the stories had earlier been published in periodicals and drew on Ms Munro’s own childhood experience.
Ms Munro’s second book, “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), was a cycle of interlocked stories about the childhood of a young woman, who wants to become a writer. Her portrait of the artist as a young girl gained international attention and was also made into a television movie, starring Ms Munro’s daughter Jenny.
Her first marriage then fell apart in 1972. She returned to southern Ontario, and married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, whom she had known as a student at the University of Western Ontario.
“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?” Alice Munro