Passing of Canadian Writer Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Canadian writer Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2013, has passed away. The writer, who died Monday night in her care home in Ontario, had been suffering from dementia for at least a dozen years. She won the prize as a "master of contemporary storytelling," the first Canadian to receive it. Munro managed to encapsulate insights, nuances, and suspense. Also a winner of the International Man Booker Prize in 2009, Alice Munro was a master of the short story and narrated intense stories of human dramas experienced in small towns. She also won the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction and two Giller Prizes (a Canadian recognition for novels or collections of stories). The life and career of the writer Alice Ann Laidlaw, known by her husband's surname, was born in Wingham, Ontario, on July 10, 1931. The eldest daughter of Robert and Alice Laidlaw, a farming family, she lived during the era of the Great Depression, a crisis that had serious repercussions in Canada. She began writing stories as a teenager and attended the University of Western Ontario thanks to a scholarship. It was there that she met her first husband, the bookseller Jim Munro, with whom she had four daughters, one of whom died shortly after birth. After the divorce in 1972, the writer married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer also met during her university years, who passed away in 2013. Dividing her time between work and family, the young writer carved out time during her daily life to write about life in rural Ontario. This landscape "intoxicated" her, the writer said, as recalled by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, and was necessary for writing her stories. "I feel at home with brick houses, barns, trailer parks, old churches, Wal-Mart, and Canadian Tire. I speak the language of this place." In her first collection of stories "Lives of Girls and Women" she talked about the mother-daughter relationship. "Understanding others was the work of her life," said her friend and writer Jane Urquhart. "Alice had an innate gift for intimacy and friendship, especially thanks to her fascinating conversational abilities. She was so deeply interested in her fellow human beings. Understanding them was the work of her life." Professor David Staines, former general manager of the New Canadian Library as well as having known her as a colleague, remembers her as a friend: "She was one of the greatest short story writers in the world today: she highlighted the beauty of the word," he believes.