Alice Munro, Canadian author of fifteen short story collections, including the Governor General’s Award–winning collections Dance of the Happy Shades and Who Do You Think You Are?, died on May 13. She was ninety-two years old.
In her prolific life, Munro picked up every notable prize for which she was eligible, sometimes more than once. In 1998 and 2004, she won the Scotiabank Giller Prize (for The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway respectively). In 2009, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for, according to the Independent, “a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” Four years later, Munro became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature but was too frail to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. In an interview with the CBC after winning, she said she hoped the $1.2 million (US) prize “would make people see the short story as an important art.”
