(PatriotWise.com) — Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose short stories about small-town Canadian women gave her global acclaim and won her a Nobel Prize, died on Monday at the age of 92.
Publisher Kirstin Cochrane of McClelland & Stewart confirmed on Tuesday that Munro passed away in her Port Hope home in Ontario. According to her family, the author had been suffering from dementia for the last ten years.
Cochrane said in a statement that Munro’s writing “inspired countless writers” and left “an indelible mark on our literary landscape.”
Munro, who published more than a dozen short story collections, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. In honoring her with the prize, the Swedish Academy compared Munro’s clear and realistic characters to those of Russian author Anton Chekhov.
The Academy described Munro as a “master of the contemporary short story” and said her stories featured “everyday but decisive events.”
After winning the Nobel Prize, Munro said in an interview with the CBC that she hoped that winning the prize “would make people see the short story as an important art” rather than something to play around with “until you’d got a novel written.”
Born Alice Laidlaw in July 1931, Munro was from a farming family in the small town of Wingham in southwestern Ontario, a region that features prominently in many of her stories.
In 1951, she married James Munro. The couple moved to British Columbia, where they ran a bookstore in Victoria. The Munros had three surviving daughters and a fourth who died shortly after birth.
While Munro first began writing as a teenager, she started writing short stories while she was a stay-at-home mom. Munro hoped to eventually write a novel but said that with three children to care for, she never had the time.
Her reputation grew in the 1970s after she started getting short stories published in the New Yorker.
Following her divorce in 1972, Munro returned to Ontario. She later remarried to Gerald Fremlin, who passed away in April 2013.
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