The Bookseller – News – Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro dies, aged 92

Chatto & Windus has paid tribute to author and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, who has died at the age of 92. 

Her long-time publisher confirmed that Munro died on the evening of Monday 13th May in her care home in Port Hope, Ontario.  

The publisher said: “Chatto & Windus [is] exceptionally proud to have been Munro’s UK publisher since 1986, when we published The Progress of Love.” 

Munro was born on 10th July 1931 and grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario where she published her first story “The Dimensions of a Shadow”. After moving to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1963, she opened Munro’s Books store with her husband at the time, James Munro.  

Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was awarded the Governor General’s Award (all her books are published by Vintage in the UK). Since then, she has published 13 collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories.  

She was awarded her second Governor General’s Literary Award in 1978 for Who Do You Think You Are?, a collection of interlinked stories that was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under the title The Beggar Maid. She was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for a third time in 1986 for The Progress of Love.  

During her illustrious career, Munro had been the recipient of many more awards and prizes, including two Giller Prizes for The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway in 1998 and 2004 respectively, the Trillium Book Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the UK’s W H Smith Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. 

In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first Canadian author and 13th woman to receive the prize, she was described by the award academy as a “master of the contemporary short story”. Her story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was filmed by Sarah Polley as “Away from Her”, and “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” as “Hateship Loveship”. 

Clara Farmer, her publisher at the Chatto & Windus, said: “Alice Munro’s beguiling stories are forever disarming. Charming and gentle on the surface, they are shot through with piercingly sharp observation, and often erupt with a terrifying turn of violence.  

“In the early years of her tenure at Chatto, publisher Carmen Callil brought Alice to the list with The Progress of Love (1986); Alice toured the UK with her publicist Ben Macintyre, who remembers her as ‘completely wonderful, and kind in the way authors are not always kind to publicists’.  

“Later trips followed, including a tour of the Borders to research The View from Castle Rock (2006), a book of stories which spoke to her Scottish ancestry. Her Nobel win, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013, saw publishers literally dancing in the aisles; everybody loved her and her work. We send heartfelt condolences to her family; we cherish her memory and her stories which are beyond compare.”