Canadian author Alice Munro, a master of the contemporary short story, passed away on May 13, 2024, at 92.
Munro's texts featured depictions of everyday but decisive events, pulling vast themes out of ordinary settings. Her characters often mirrored her own rural Ontario lifestyle. 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 city, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level," she said. "As far as I knew, at least for a while, I was the only person I knew who wrote stories."
Munro's first short story was published when she was 37, a college dropout squeezing in writing time around her children's naps. By the time she was in her 60s, she had become one of the most celebrated short-story writers in the world. Throughout her long career, she hardly ever failed to wow readers and critics with her quietly powerful language. In reviewing her last collection, Dear Life, NPR critic Alan Cheuse wrote "A Munro story gives us so much life within the bounds of a single tale that it nourishes (滋养) us almost as much as a novel does."
In a literary culture that tends to celebrate novels over shorter fiction, Munro has been a constant advocate for the power of the short story. In the interview, Munro emphasized the significance of her win not for herself, but for her art form: "I really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you play around with until you get a novel written."
When asked "Do you want young women to be inspired by your books and feel inspired to write?" Munro replied, "I don't care about that. I want people to find not so much inspiration as great joy. I want them to think of my books as related to their own lives in ways."
