Alice Munro
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Alice Ann Munro, née Laidlaw (born 10 July 1931) is an award-winning Canadian short-story writer and novelist who is widely considered one of the world's premier fiction writers.
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[edit] Biography
Alice Munro was born in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario into a family of fox and poultry farmers. Her father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, a school teacher, was named Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney). She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," while a student at the University of Western Ontario in 1950. During this period she worked as a waitress, tobacco picker and library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, in which she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry James Munro and move to Vancouver, British Columbia. Her daughters Sheila and Jenny were born in 1953 and 1957, respectively. In 1963, she moved to Victoria and opened Munro Books with her husband. In 1966, her third daughter, Andrea was born.
Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), was highly acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General's Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. This success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories that was published as a novel.
She and James Munro were divorced in 1972 when she returned to Ontario to become Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario. In 1976 she married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, where they currently live.
In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States); this book led Munro to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for a second time. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980 she held the position of Writer-in-Residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s Munro published a short-story collection about once every four years to increasing acclaim, winning both national and international awards.
In 2002, her daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.
Her stories frequently appear in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review.
In interviews to promote her 2006 collection The View from Castle Rock, Munro has suggested that she may not publish any further collections.
Her story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" has been adapted for the screen and directed by Sarah Polley as the film Away From Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, which successfully debuted at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.
[edit] Writing style
Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers of the rural South. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. However, the reaction of Munro's characters is less intense than their Southern counterparts. Thus, particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the essence of Everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic. Munro's work is often compared with the great short story writers. For example, the American writer Cynthia Ozick called Munro "our Chekhov."
A frequent theme of her work has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.
Munro's spare and lucid language and command of detail gives her fiction a "remarkable precision," as Helen Hoy observes. Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.[1] As Robert Thacker notes:
Munro's writing creates what amounts almost to an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude — not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism' — but rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being
– [2]
Numerous critics have also asserted that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels.[citation needed]
[edit] Bibliography
- Dance of the Happy Shades - 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
- Lives of Girls and Women - 1971
- Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You - 1974
- Who Do You Think You Are? - 1978 (winner of the 1978 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
- The Moons of Jupiter - 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
- The Progress of Love - 1986 (winner of the 1986 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
- Friend of My Youth - 1990 (winner of the Trillium Book Award)
- Open Secrets - 1994 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
- Selected Stories - 1996
- The Love of a Good Woman - 1998 (winner of the 1998 Giller Prize)
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - 2001
- No Love Lost - 2003
- Vintage Munro - 2004
- Runaway - 2004 (winner of the 2004 Giller Prize) ISBN 1-4000-4281-X
- The View from Castle Rock - 2006
[edit] Awards and honours
In Canada, Munro has received three Governor General's Awards for English-language Fiction (the most for any author), two Giller Prizes, the Trillium Book Award and the Canadian Booksellers Award. Internationally, she has won the WH Smith Literary Award in the UK; the National Book Critics Circle Award and the O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement in Short Fiction in the U.S.; the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction; the Rea Award for the Short Story; and the Libris Award. She has also won the Canada-Australia Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional Award for Canada and the Caribbean.
In 1986, Alice Munro was awarded the Marian Engel Award for her body of work. In 1993, she was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal. In 1992, she was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Munro won the Giller Prize in 2004 for her short story collection Runaway. It was her second Giller; her first was in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman. The Love of a Good Woman was also selected as a candidate in the CBC's 2004 edition of Canada Reads, in which it was advocated by opera singer Measha Brueggergosman.
Munro received the Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club in February 2005. The award, given annually for a body of work of literary excellence was presented to Munro at a ceremony in New York hosted by novelist Russell Banks that included tributes by former winner Margaret Atwood and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham [3].
[edit] References
- Hoy, H. 1980. "'Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable': Paradox and Double Vision In Alice Munro's Fiction." Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC), Volume 5.1.
- Thacker, R. 1998. Review of Some other reality: Alice Munro's Something I've been Meaning to Tell You, by Louis K. MacKendrick. Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1998.
- Thacker, R. 2005. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
[edit] External links
- Alice Munro Page Unofficial website.
- Munro, Alice The Canadian Encyclopedia.
- Alice Munro A Biocritical Essay of Munro's earlier work by Thomas E. Tausky (1986) The University of Calgary Library Special Collections.
- A Quiet Genius Review by Mona Simpson (2001) The Atlantic Online.
- Review of Munro's short stories
- 'It was about vanishing': A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories by Mark Levene
- Alice Munro Biography of Alice Munro, adapted from Meyer Literature site.
- Paula Todd's Studio 2 interview. "Literarily Speaking with Alice Munro" TVOntario, April 5, 2006--high speed
- low speed version of April 5, 2006 interview
- TV Ontario's archive of Munro materials
- Short story "Dimension" online at The New Yorker website
