Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died

The Canadian writer Alice Munro, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and whose stories about the loves and tribulations of the women of a small town in her homeland made her an acclaimed master of the short story, died Monday at age 92, the newspaper reported. Globe and Mail.

The Globe, citing members of his family, said Tuesday that Munro had suffered from dementia for at least a decade. Munro published more than a dozen short story collections and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

The books that Alice Munro wrote

Their Stories explored sex, longing, discontent, aging, moral conflict, and other themes. in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar: towns and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario, where she lived. She was an expert at developing characters complex in the limited pages of a short story.

Munro, who he wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realismwas often compared to Anton Chekhovthe 19th-century Russian author known for his brilliant short stories, a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in awarding him the Nobel Prize. The Academy described her as “master of the contemporary short story”: “His texts often present descriptions of everyday but decisive events, a kind of epiphanies, which illuminate the surrounding history and let existential questions appear in a flash.”

The interview that the writer had after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature

In an interview given to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation After winning the Nobel Prize, Munro declared: “I think that my stories have had quite a notable diffusion for short stories, “And I really hope this makes people see the short story as an important art, not just something you play with until you have a novel written.”

Between His works include: “A Dance of Happy Shadows” (1968), “The Lives of Women” (1971), “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Hate, Friendship, Dating, Love, Marriage” (2001), “Fugitive” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” ” (2009) and “Dear Life” (2012).

The Characters in his stories were often girls and women who lead apparently unexceptional lives, but They struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and suffocating marriages. to repressed love and the ravages of age.

Its story of a woman who begins to lose her memory and agrees to enter a nursing hometitled “The Bear Crossed the Mountain”, from “Hate, Friendship, Dating, Love, Marriage”, was adapted into the 2006 Oscar-nominated film “Far from Her”, directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley.

The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwoodwhich he wrote in Guardian after Munro won the Nobel, he summarized his work.

“Shame and modesty are driving forces for Munro’s characters, just as perfectionism in writing has been a driving force for her: getting it done, getting it right, but also the impossibility of it. Munro reports failure much more often than successbecause the writer’s task has failure built into it.”

The short story, a style most popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has long been relegated to the background compared to the novel in popular taste -and when it comes to attracting awards-. But Munro was able to infuse his short stories with a richness of plot and a depth of detail that is usually more typical of long novels.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just for practice, until I had time to write a novel. “Then I discovered that they were the only thing I could do and that’s how I dealt with it,” Munro told the magazine. New Yorker in 2012.

Alice Munro’s awards wins

Was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the first with a clearly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but raised in Chicago and was considered an American writer.

Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize -the most prestigious Canadian literary award- on two occasions. Alice Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, a small town in the southwestern region of Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, into a family of farmers with economic difficulties, and began writing in the adolescence.

Munro began writing short stories while staying at home. Her intention was to write a novel one day, but with three children she never found the time. The author began to make a name for herself when her stories began to appear in the New Yorker in the 1970s.

She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria (British Columbia), where they both ran a bookstore. They had four daughters – one died within hours of birth – before divorcing in 1972. Munro then returned to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.

In 2009, Munro revealed he had undergone heart bypass surgery and that he had received cancer treatment.