Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-winning short story author, dies at 92

The writer Alice Munro has died, at the age of 92. The news was confirmed by her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada.

Munro was a craftsman, known for her intricately paced short stories that could devastate a reader. Her characters often lived in rural Ontario, like Munro herself. In an interview after winning the Nobel Prize, she said that living in a small town gave her the freedom to write. “I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level,” she said. “I was the only person I knew who wrote stories, though I didn’t tell them to anybody, and as far as I knew, at least for a while, I was the only person who could do this in the world.”

Munro was born in 1931, outside of Wingham Ontario. After college, she moved to Victoria, British Columbia, and opened a bookstore, known as Munro’s Books, with her then-husband James, known as Munro’s Books. Her first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades won Canada’s prestigious Governor’s General’s Award. That kicked off a career that would span 14 story collections, as well as the novel Lives of Girls and Women.