Alice Munro

Born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, in the depths of the Depression, Munro was the daughter of a fox and mink farmer and a schoolteacher whose Parkinson's disease, beginning in the early 1940s, darkened a household already strict and hard. She was writing as a teenager and published her first story in 1950 while on a scholarship at the University of Western Ontario, working as a waitress, a tobacco picker and a library clerk to get by. In 1951 she left to marry a fellow student, James Munro, and moved with him to West Vancouver, where she raised their daughters and wrote in whatever gaps the house allowed; in 1961 a local paper ran a piece on her under the headline "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories". In 1963 the couple opened Munro's Books in Victoria. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, and Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), shortlisted for the Booker Prize as The Beggar Maid, confirmed her as a writer of stories rather than the novels her publisher wanted. After her divorce she returned to Ontario and in 1976 married the geographer Gerald Fremlin, settling in Clinton in the Huron County country her stories made famous. Collection followed collection, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, Runaway and more, many first printed in The New Yorker, and she won the Governor General's Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and, in 2013, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the thirteenth woman to receive it. She died in Port Hope, Ontario, in 2024. Two months later her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed that Fremlin had sexually abused her as a child, that Munro had learned of it in 1992 and stayed with him, and that he had pleaded guilty in 2005, a revelation that has changed how many readers approach her life and work.

One Sunday afternoon around 1969, stuck and frightened of never writing again, Munro was sent down to the family bookshop by her husband Jim, who promised to make supper. He could cook only meatballs, and made them. Surrounded by books she tried to ignore, she began the work that became Lives of Girls and Women.