The Literary Encyclopedia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Alice Munro
(1931-)

Active: 1950- in Canada, North America

(Alice Ann Laidlaw)

By Robert James McGill (University of East Anglia)

Indexing Data:

  • Active In: Canada, North America
  • Born In: Canada, North America
  • Activity: Story Writer, Novelist

Life, Works and Times

Reader Actions

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 Scott

This article in full comprises 2280 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership,
please click here.

First published 24 June 2002

Citation: McGill, Robert James. "Alice Munro". The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5050, accessed 9 February 2010.]