21 Facts About Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Alice Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.

Alice Munro's stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.

Alice Munro is a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway.

Alice Munro's father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming.

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Alice Munro's mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw, was a schoolteacher.

Alice Munro is of Irish and Scottish descent; her father is a descendant of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.

Alice 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 on a two-year scholarship.

Alice Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize.

In 1980 Alice Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.

On 10 October 2013, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story".

Alice Munro is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Alice Munro is noted for her longtime association with editor and publisher Douglas Gibson.

When Gibson left Macmillan of Canada in 1986 to launch the Douglas Gibson Books imprint at McClelland and Stewart, Alice Munro returned the advance Macmillan had already paid her for The Progress of Love so that she could follow Gibson to the new company.

Almost 20 of Alice Munro's works have been made available for free on the web, in most cases only the first versions.

Alice Munro's work is often compared with the great short-story writers.

Research on Alice Munro's work has been undertaken since the early 1970s, with the first PhD thesis published in 1972.

Alice Munro publishes variant versions of her stories, sometimes within a short span of time.

Alice Munro's stories "Save the Reaper" and "Passion" came out in two different versions in the same year, in 1998 and 2004 respectively.

Alice 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.

At a Toronto appearance in October 2009, Alice Munro indicated that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary-artery bypass surgery.