Alice Ann Munro OOnt (/mənˈroʊ/ mən-ROH; née Laidlaw /ˈleɪdlɔː/ LAYD-law; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer,[1] and later turned to turkey farming.

[3] Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship.

[13][14] Munro's first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize.

This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award[16] and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under its international title, The Beggar Maid.

[20] In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story".

[28][circular reference] From the period before 2003, 16 stories have been included in Munro's own compilations more than twice, with two of her works scoring four republications: "Carried Away" and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage".

Film adaptations of Munro's short stories include Martha, Ruth and Edie (1988), Edge of Madness (2002), Away from Her (2006), Hateship, Loveship (2013) and Julieta (2016).

Asked after she won the Nobel Prize, "What can be so interesting in describing small town Canadian life?

[29] In work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, women alone, and the elderly.

[34] Her prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time", "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry", "special, useless knowledge", "tones of shrill and happy outrage", "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it".

[35] Robert Thacker wrote: Munro's writing creates ... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them.

[38] The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo's first conference on her work, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, was published in 1984.

In 2006, Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano reported that Munro had not wanted to reread the galleys of Runaway (2004): "No, because I'll rewrite the stories."

[20] In 2009, Munro revealed that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary artery bypass surgery.

[46] On 7 July 2024, shortly after Munro's death, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed in an essay in the Toronto Star that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her starting in 1976 when she was nine years old and ending when she became a teenager.

[49][50] For The New York Times, Giles Harvey wrote: "Munro's stories—particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse—are full of violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies... Munro seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay.

"[49] Articles in The New Yorker and The New Republic note that many of Munro's stories written afterward relate to the topic, such as "Vandals", in which a woman vandalizes the house of a couple where the man molested her as a child, and "Dimension", in which a woman defends her desire to keep making jail visits to the husband who killed their three children.

[50][51] Munro's biographer Robert Thacker was aware of the allegations, but did not mention them in his 2005 biography of her, though Skinner contacted him with her story shortly before it was published.

[58] In her New York Times obituary, Munro's works were credited for "attracting a new generation of readers" and she was called a "master of the short story".

[59] Her works and career have been ranked alongside other well-established short story writers such as Anton Chekhov and John Cheever.

[58] As in Chekhov, Garan Holcombe writes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail."

She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward.

"[63] Sherry Linkon, professor at Georgetown University, said that Munro's works "helped remodel and revitalize the short-story form".