Topline
Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who wrote a prolific number of short stories, including many about the complex lives of women, died in a Canadian nursing home at the age of 92 on Monday after a 44-year career that won her dozens of literary accolades and led to 1.2 million print books sold in the last 20 years.
Key Facts
Munro was hailed as “a master of the contemporary short story” when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, one year after she published her last ever collection titled “Dear Life.”
Her debut collection, titled “Dance of the Happy Shades,” won her one of Canada’s most prestigious honors in the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1968, and her work continued to win critical praise through the entirety of her career.
“Dear Life,” which was released in 2012, months before she announced her retirement from writing, was Munro’s best-selling work of all time with almost 300,000 copies sold since its publication, according to data from Circana.
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story of a man whose wife with Alzheimer’s disease starts a relationship with another man, is considered to be Munro’s most famous work (it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film called “Away From Her” in 2006).
Over her career, Munro won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Giller Prize, Man Booker International Prize and dozens of other awards—she was also a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and was featured on a silver coin from the Royal Canadian Mint and a postage stamp in Canada.
Munro published one novel, “Lives of Girls and Women,” in 1971, which was adapted into a CBC Television series in the 1990s.
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Crucial Quote
“I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life,” Munro said about her work “Dear Life.”
Alice Munro’s Best-Selling Books (circana Data From 2004 To May 4, 2024)
“Dear Life” (trade paperback) — 236,880 copies sold
“Runaway” (trade paperback) — 203,140 copies sold
“Runaway” (hardcover) — 92,281 copies sold
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (trade paperback) — 81,341 copies sold
“Too Much Happiness” (hardcover) — 69,291
“Too Much Happiness” (trade paperback) — 65,726
“Dear Life” (hardcover) — 62,618 copies sold
“The View from Castle Rock” (hardcover) — 43,344 copies sold
“Selected Stories” (trade paperback) — 39,540 copies sold
“The Love of a Good Woman” (trade paperback) — 35,671 copies sold
Key Background
Born Alice Ann Laidlaw, Munro was born as the first of three children in Ontario. She cared for her mother through a Parkinson’s diagnosis before majoring in journalism at the University of Western Ontario. She ultimately dropped out of school before she married in 1951 and had four children, one of whom died at birth. She and James Munro divorced in 1972 and she married geographer Gerald Fremlin four years later (they were married until his death in 2013). She spoke often of her life as a mother, as well as the struggles of balancing parenthood with her career. In 2009, she shared she’d had a heart bypass surgery and had been treated for cancer, according to the New York Times. She did not travel to Sweden to receive her Nobel in 2013, saying she was too frail for the journey.