Alice Munro: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

Alice Munro: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013Alice Ann Munro was born on 10th July 1931. She is a Canadian author writing in English. The recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, she is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. The focus of Munro's fiction is her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov." In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story".

Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (n�e Chamney), was a schoolteacher. 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 under a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of interlinked stories sometimes erroneously described as a novel. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States). This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980 Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a short-story collection about once every four years.

Munro's stories have appeared frequently in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review. In interviews to promote her 2006 collection The View from Castle Rock, Munro suggested that she might not publish any further collections. She later recanted and published further work. Her collection Too Much Happiness was published in August 2009. Her story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was adapted for the screen and directed by Sarah Polley as Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. It debuted at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost to No Country for Old Men.

On 10 October 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story". She is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the omniscient narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers from the rural South of the United States. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.

Munro's work is often compared with the great short-story writers. In her stories, as in Chekhov's, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekhov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward."

A frequent theme of her work�particularly evident in her early stories�has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.

Alice Munro: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013Munro's 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." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life.

As Robert Thacker notes:
"Munro's writing creates... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude � not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism' � but rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being." Many critics have asserted that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, gave a simple answer: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."

Munro married James Munro in 1951. Their daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957 respectively; Catherine died 15 hours after birth.
In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. In 1966, their daughter Andrea was born. Alice and James Munro divorced in 1972.

Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario, and in 1976 received an honorary LLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met in her university days. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88. At a Toronto appearance in October 2009, Munro indicated that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary-artery bypass surgery.

In 2002, her daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.

Original short-story collections of Alice Munro
 

  • Dance of the Happy Shades � 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award for Fiction)

  • Lives of Girls and Women � 1971

  • Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You � 1974

  • Who Do You Think You Are? � 1978 (winner of the 1978 Governor General's Award for Fiction; also published as The Beggar Maid)

  • The Moons of Jupiter � 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)

  • The Progress of Love � 1986 (winner of the 1986 Governor General's Award for Fiction)

  • Friend of My Youth � 1990 (winner of the Trillium Book Award)

  • Open Secrets � 1994 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)

  • The Love of a Good Woman � 1998 (winner of the 1998 Giller Prize)

  • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage � 2001 (republished as Away From Her)

  • Runaway � 2004 (winner of the 2004 Giller Prize) ISBN 1-4000-4281-X

  • The View from Castle Rock � 2006

  • Too Much Happiness � 2009

  • Dear Life � 2012

 

Short-story compilations of Alice Munro

  • Selected Stories � 1996

  • No Love Lost � 2003

  • Vintage Munro � 2004

  • Carried Away: A Selection of Stories � 2006

  • New Selected Stories � 2011

 

Awards to Alice Munro

  • Governor General's Literary Award for English language fiction (1968, 1978, 1986)

  • Canadian Booksellers Award for Lives of Girls and Women (1971)

  • Shortlisted for the annual (UK) Booker Prize for Fiction (now the Man Booker Prize) (1980) for The Beggar Maid

  • Marian Engel Award (1986)

  • Trillium Book Award for Friend of My Youth (1991), The Love of a Good Woman (1999) and Dear Life (2013)

  • WH Smith Literary Award (1995, UK) for Open Secrets

  • PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1997)

  • National Book Critics Circle Award (1998, U.S.) For The Love of a Good Woman

  • Giller Prize (1998 and 2004)

  • Rea Award for the Short Story (2001) given to a living American or Canadian author.

  • Libris Award

  • O. Henry Award for continuing achievement in short fiction in the U.S. for "Passion" (2006) and "What Do You Want To Know For" (2008)

  • Man Booker International Prize (2009, UK)

  • Canada-Australia Literary Prize

  • Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional Award for Canada and the Caribbean.

  • Nobel Prize in Literature (2013) as "master of the contemporary short story".
     

Honours to Alice Munro

  • Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1992

  • Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal 1993

  • Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club 2005

  • Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters 2010

  • Five stories of Alice Munro and their critical acclaim.

  • �Lives of Girls and Women� (Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)


Few write about the horror and thrill of budding sexuality as well as Munro, an experience that runs in parallel with so many other things: self-discovery, self-assertion, the dynamics of gender and power. Here, young Del Jordan has a teasing, tantalizing flirtation with the gentleman friend of her mother�s boarder. It contains possibly the most comic description of an unwanted penis you will ever read.

Alice Munro: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013�The Moons of Jupiter� (The Moons of Jupiter, 1982)

A good primer for how Munro�s stories often look one way but feel another. With her father in the hospital and her own daughter absent, the narrator visits a planetarium. A planetarium, of course! And yet the usually reliable celestial-body metaphor somehow fails to adequately explain the blank space that sits, helplessly, between family members. You feel that this is possibly the point.

�The Love of a Good Woman� (The Love of a Good Woman, 1998)

The frequent, somewhat silly refrain is that Munro squeezes a novel into each story. That description is more apt than usual with the long �Love of a Good Woman,� which any reader should sink into with ease. Sex! Murder! A small town! And a hold-your-breath ending in which love and death feel like equal possibilities.



�Family Furnishings� (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001)

An aspiring writer (a little-noted recurring figure in Munro) grows to disdain a close family friend she once admired as a child. Only Munro could pull this off: She hides within the story�s folds a deep family secret that, when revealed, somehow ends up taking second place to a chilling awareness that the narrator has about her own nature.


�Dear Life� (Dear Life, 2012)

Possibly Munro�s final story (or memoir, depending), but don't save it for last�it is that good, and that representative of Munro�s artistic project. The story hinges on a memory that cannot be a real memory: the narrator as an infant being whisked inside the house by her mother as a neighbor approaches. What seems at first a meandering investigation becomes, quite suddenly, a fine-pointed insight into the mother-daughter relationship that anchors so much of Munro�s work, and feeds so much of its regret, determination, and affection.

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Dated 14  October 2013

 

 

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