Munro, Alice, short story writer (b at Wingham, Ont 10 July 1931). Munro's early years were spent in western Ontario. She met her first husband, James Munro, at the U of Western Ontario, and after 2 years of university she moved with him to Vancouver. In 1963 she helped establish the bookstore Munro's Books, and in 1972 she returned to Ontario where she married Gerald Fremlin in 1976. She was awarded the Governor General's Award for Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), which was also runner-up for the Booker Prize. She is also the recipient of the Canadian Booksellers Assn International Book Year Award for Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1977), and the first winner of the Marian Engel Award (1986). The strength of her fiction arises partially from its vivid sense of regional focus, most of her stories being set in Huron County, Ont, as well as from her sense of the narrator as the intelligence through which the world is articulated. Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms with family and small town. Her more recent work has addressed the problems of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. Characteristic of her style is the search for some revelatory gesture by which an event is illuminated and given personal significance.
In Lives of Girls and Women, each story is organized around a metaphor whose function is to draw all the elements of the various fictional sequences into a radiant centre. Thus the death of the protagonist's Uncle Craig that occurs in "Heirs of the Living Body" is related to other deaths and envisioned as part of natural process, such that the protagonist's mother can announce that "'Uncle Craig doesn't have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!'" He, like all of Munro's characters, shares one living body, although the connections might not always be perfectly clear. The implicit connection that does not always lead to epiphanic discovery is more apparent in The Moons of Jupiter (1982), for here relationships are suggested but the threads of attachment are not always unravelled.
It is sometimes remarked that Munro's fiction is nearer to autobiography than fiction. In defence of Lives of Girls and Women, which is most frequently identified as being modelled on her life, Munro has asserted it is "autobiographical in form but not in fact." The distinction is perhaps not persuasive, but the charge is difficult to evade, for Munro's ear for the local speech has an absolute pitch, and her narrators as filters of past and present possess an intelligence that makes one feel that if it is not her life being told, then it is ours.
In many ways, furthermore, Who Do You Think You Are? may be considered a mature sequel toLives, tracing the pattern, at least, of Munro's move to the west coast and back. Dance of the Happy Shades and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), while containing some material that overlaps with experience drawn from the author's life, are carefully sequenced collections of short stories. Her collection, The Progress of Love (1986), is a distillation of much of her work, exploring with increased profundity the problems of time and the narrator's relation to it, in a prose that is perfectly instinct with wonder and compassion. It also won the Governor General's Award.
Her later collections, Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994) and The Love of a Good Woman (1998), have shown her continuing development as a writer and have extended her fame beyond Canada's borders. In 1995 she won the W.H. Smith Award in Britain and in 1999 the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award in the US.
