Alice Munro

Robert McGill (University of Toronto)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

Born 10 Jul 1931
Activity 1950-ongoing

Places

Born in Canada
Active in Canada

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Story-writer

Resources

Munro's Works

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The Canadian writer Alice Munro's short stories have garnered numerous international honours, including a 1978 Booker Prize nomination. Among the outstanding attributes of her writing are its concern with women's lives, its exploration of geography and identity, and its evocation of the mysterious, indeterminate character of everyday life.

Born Alice Ann Laidlaw in 1931, she grew up near the small town of Wingham in Huron County, Ontario in a red-brick farmhouse with her parents, a brother and a sister. Both her mother Anne and her father Robert had also been raised on farms – her father in nearby Blyth, and her mother in the Ottawa valley – and were of a socioeconomic class that Munro has called “the privileged poor”. Of Scottish and Irish descent, the family's ancestry has been

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2280 words

Citation: McGill, Robert. "Alice Munro". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5050, accessed 28 April 2024.]

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