Ottawa: Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro passed away at the age of 92, according to her publisher, who announced the news on Tuesday. Her finely crafted stories of the loves, aspirations, and struggles of small-town women in her native land made her a world-renowned grasp of the little story.
Munro had died at her residence in Port Hope, Ontario, said Kristin Cochrane, chief executive officer of McClelland &, Stewart.
” Alice’s creating inspired numerous artists… and her job leaves an indelible mark on our intellectual landscape”, she said in a statement.
The Globe and Mail news, citing family people, said Munro had died on Monday after suffering from memory for at least a century.
Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature and was the author of more than a dozen little stories.
Her stories explored intercourse, yearning, discontent, aging, spiritual conflict and different themes in remote settings with which she was deeply acquainted- villages and farms in the French province of Ontario. Within the briefest pages of a short story, she was skilled at thoroughly developing sophisticated figures.
Alice Munro was a literary symbol in Canada. Her little tales have won American and international readers ‘ hearts for 60 years, according to Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge on the X social media network.
Munro, a 19th-century Russian writer known for his beautiful short stories, was frequently compared to Anton Chekhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for her clearness and realism.
The Academy also referred to her as a “master of the fashionable little account,” adding that “her texts frequently contain epiphanies of a type that illuminate the context and elicit philosophical questions to surface in the form of flashes of lightning.”
After winning the Nobel, Munro said in an appointment with the American Broadcasting Corporation,” I think my reports have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and I hope that this will inspire people to view the little story as a significant arts, not just something you played around with until you’ve got a book written.”
Her works included:” Dance of the Happy Shades” ( 1968 ),” Lives of Girls and Women” ( 1971 ),” Who Do You Think You Are”? ( 1978 ),” The Moons of Jupiter” ( 1982 ),” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” ( 2001 ),” Runaway” ( 2004 ),” The View from Castle Rock” ( 2006 ),” Too Much Happiness” ( 2009 ) and” Dear Life” ( 2012 ).
Girls and women who appeared to live relatively ordinary lives but experienced a range of hardships, including suffocating marriages and repressed love and the effects of aging, were frequently the characters in her stories.
” Last month I reread all of Alice Munro’s publications. I felt like I needed to be near to her. Every day I read her is a fresh experience. I change with each change. Heather O’Neill, a well-known American publisher, wrote in a post on X that” She will live forever.”
Munro’s tale of a person who starts losing her recollection and agrees to provide a medical home titled” The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, from” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”, was adapted into the Oscar- chosen 2006 film” Away From Her”, directed by other French Sarah Polley.
” Shame and embarrassment”
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, writing in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel, summarized her work by saying:” Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Because the writer’s job has a history of failure, Munro frequently documents failure more than she does success.
Reading Munro, the book I’ve read in 2005, “puts me in that quiet reflection about my own life: about the choices I’ve made, the actions I’ve done and have n’t done, the kind of person I am, the chance of death,” said American novelist Jonathan Franzen.
In terms of popular preferences and attracting awards, the short story has long taken a backseat to the novel. However, Munro was able to add depth and depth of detail to her short stories, which are typically found in full-length works.
” For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice,’ til I got time to write a novel. Then I realized that all I could do was to face that. Munro told the New Yorker magazine in 2012 that his efforts to get so much into stories served as a reward.
She was the first Canadian-born author to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, and the second with a distinct Canadian birth. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was a well-known American writer who was raised in Chicago but was born and raised in Quebec.
Munro also won two awards, the Giller Prize, Canada’s most well-known literary award, and the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.
On July 10, 1931, Alice Laidlaw, a farmer from a hard-pressed family in Wingham, Ontario, began writing in her teens. This small town serves as the setting for many of her stories.
Munro started writing short stories as a stay-at-home mother at the time. She claimed she never had the time to write a novel due to the fact that she had three children. In the 1970s, Munro’s stories started appearing in the New Yorker, and she started gaining popularity.
She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. Before their divorce in 1972, they had four daughters, one of whom passed away shortly after being born. Afterward, Munro moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.
Munro revealed in 2009 that she had undergone cancer treatment and had had heart bypass surgery.
