Alice Munro

Alice Munro wrote in the gaps of the day. A young mother outside Vancouver in the 1950s, she found it easier to finish short stories than the novels her publisher wanted. In 1961 the Vancouver Sun ran a short piece on her headlined “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories”.

She stayed with the short story. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General’s Award. Most of her stories are set in Huron County, Ontario, where she grew up, the daughter of a fox and mink farmer. They move backwards and forwards in time and can cover a whole life in a few pages. In 2013 the Swedish Academy gave her the Nobel Prize, calling her a “master of the contemporary short story”. She was the first Canadian to receive it.

Munro died in 2024. Two months later her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her as a child, and that her mother learned of it in 1992 and stayed with him. The revelation has led many readers to reassess Munro’s legacy.

To start, try Runaway (2004): Pedro Almodóvar built his film Julieta from three of its stories. Or watch Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, adapted from one of her stories, and then read the original.