Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest short story writers in the English language, has died at the age of 92 at her care home in Ontario, after suffering dementia for more than a decade. Born and raised in south-western Ontario, the “Canadian Chekhov” captured the desire and darkness of ordinary life in rural Canada, particularly for women – subjects long out of focus for the mainstream, finally achieving recognition later in life.
A housewife and mother of four children, one of whom died in infancy, Munro would sneak in writing around naps and housework, publishing her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968, at age 37. Lives of Girls and Women, her only novel – really a collection of interlinked stories, as she called it – followed in 1971. A writer of what Jonathan Franzen called “pathological empathy”, Munro continued to write short story collections centered on the sublime and mundane in small-town Canada throughout her life, concluding with 2012’s Dear Life. Here are some of her most memorable quotes:
