Tributes from Margaret Atwood, Stephen King and more have poured in in the wake of her passing.
Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro has died at the age of 92 in her home in Port Hope, Ontario, her publisher confirmed.
In a statement published on the Penguin Random House Canada site, Kristin Cochrane, the company’s chief executive officer, said: “Alice Munro is a national treasure — a writer of enormous depth, empathy, and humanity whose work is read, admired, and cherished by readers throughout Canada and around the world.
“Alice’s writing inspired countless writers too, and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape. All of us at Penguin Random House Canada mourn this loss and we join together with our colleagues at Penguin Random House in the US, the UK, and globally in appreciation for all that Alice Munro has left behind.”
A prolific writer often compared to Russian great Anton Chekhov, Munro published 13 story collections, two volumes of selected stories and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women.
“I want to tell a story in the old-fashioned way — what happens to somebody,” she told Vintage Books of her approach in 1998. “But I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens.”
Her work earned her the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, with the committee referring to her as a “master of contemporary short story”.
Writer Stephen King echoed the sentiment on X (formerly known as Twitter), where he praised Munro for being “one of the absolute best at the short story”.
What Heidi said. Alice Munro, one of the absolute best at the short story. https://t.co/zp91xIJJoV
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 14, 2024
Other writers have also joined in the tributes, including fellow Canadian legend and writer of The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood, who wrote: “Very sorry to hear that very old friend and fellow writer [Alice Munro] has died. It would have been her 93rd birthday in July. Many memories, for over 45 years…”
Very sorry to hear that very old friend and fellow writer #AliceMunro has died. It would have been her 93rd birthday in July. Many memories, for over 45 years...
— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 15, 2024
Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, to a former schoolteacher and a fox farmer, with the Ontario countryside often appearing in her work.
Though she moved to Vancouver after marrying her first husband, she returned after her divorce and re-married. It was around this time she had her first story published in The New Yorker, beginning a long working relationship with the publication before having her work appear in The Paris Review and The Atlantic Monthly.
Before that, however, Munro had already won the Governor General’s Award, which she would go on to win twice more. In 2009, she added another accolade to her growing collection: the Man Booker Prize for lifetime achievement.
Her short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, was adapted into 2006 film Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.
Her final story collection, Dear Life, was published in 2012, a year before she won the Novel Prize in Literature.