Birthday: The Great Canadian

Alice Ann Munro (1931-  )

Short story writer

Recipient, The Canadian Governor General’s Award, 1968 1978, 1986

Recipient, The PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction,  1997

Recipient, The Man Booker International Prize, 2009

Recipient, The Nobel Prize in Literature, 2013

Such is the value of literary merit in Canada, that when Alice Munro became the first Canadian- and only the thirteenth woman- to win the Nobel Prize, the government issued a stamp and a silver coin to mark the occasion.

Born in Ontario, Munro married in college, dropped out, and moved with her husband to British Columbia, where they eventually opened the still-operating Munro’s Books in Victoria. Her first collection of short stories won the Governor General’s Award in 1968 and she is widely credited with reviving the short story format. Her tales move back and forth in time, and pack the emotional intensity and depth of a novel. A tireless reviser, she has rewritten, and republished, many of her stories over the decades- a few as many as four times. In the succeeding versions, characters change and age, and their reactions to situations are altered as one would find in life.

Munro’s writing is almost entirely centered in the land and people of the southern Ontario county where she grew up. Her male characters are good blokes; her women as nuanced and multifaceted. Over time her work has moved- rather like the Irish short story writer William Trevor’s more and more to characters who live alone, at life’s margins, in middle and old age, finding, in the day to day, revelations that give new meaning.