Alice Munro (1931–2024)

Alice Munro grew up in rural Ontario, the daughter of a fox and mink farmer. She married young, raised three children, and published her first short story collection at thirty-seven. She spent fifty years writing stories set in small Ontario towns and the lives of women who grew up in them, and in doing so she became the most formally innovative short story writer in the English language.

Her stories do not obey chronology. Time folds. A character will be introduced as an old woman and then, in the middle of a paragraph, become a child again — not as memory but as the present tense of the narrative. She understands that a life is not a line. It is a series of oblique approaches to things that cannot be looked at directly.

The women in her stories carry, with impassive precision, the weight of choices made and not made, lives lived beside the lives they might have had. Nothing is resolved. That is the truth she is after.

She received the Nobel Prize in 2013, described as "master of the contemporary short story." She died in 2024.

At eighty-two she was too frail to travel to Stockholm. In place of a lecture she gave a filmed conversation, "In Her Own Words" (2013). It starts with the first story she remembers being read to her — Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", which she found "dreadfully sad". Watch it at NobelPrize.org.