Alice Munro

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and grew up in Ontario, Canada. She has published the following short story collections: "Dance of the Happy Shades," 1968 (Governor General's Award for Fiction), "Lives of Girls and Women," 1971 (considered by some as a novel in stories), "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You," 1974, "Who Do You Think You Are?," 1978 (Governor General's Award for Fiction), "The Moons of Jupiter," 1982, "The Progress of Love," 1986 (Governor General's Award for Fiction), "Friend of My Youth," 1990 (Trillium Book Award), "Open Secrets," 1994, "The Love of a Good Woman," 1998 (Giller Prize), "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," 2001 (published in Greek as "Μ' αγαπάει, δεν μ' αγαπάει," and reissued as "Away From Her"), "Runaway," 2004 (Giller Prize), "The View from Castle Rock," 2006, "Too Much Happiness," 2009 (published in Greek as "Πάρα πολλή ευτυχία"), "Dear Life," 2012 (forthcoming in Greek). She has been awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada's highest literary honor, three times. She has also been recognized by the U.S. Critics' Association and received the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2009, she was honored with the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. The award committee noted: "With each of her stories, Munro achieves a depth and precision that most novelists manage only over the course of their entire work; reading her, you always learn something you never thought of before." Her works have been translated into many languages. Although they have sold 1 million copies in the U.S. alone, her recognition was not as widespread as it deserved outside a circle of literary "specialists" until 2013, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first Canadian author and the 13th woman to receive it—as "a master of the contemporary short story," according to the brief announcement by the Swedish Academy. Upon the announcement of her award, her work was publicly admired by authors such as Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Franzen, among others.