Reading wasn't really encouraged in her family. "I like that nobody here cares much about writing," she said. According to Munro, no one in Clinton, Ont., where she's lived since the 1970s, knows who she is, "or if they do, they're a little embarrassed." Munro would reframe the stories in the book with herself as the heroine, and change the endings: "If I really liked my heroine in the story I didn't get her head chopped off - I changed the story so that wouldn't happen."ġ6. Dickens's A Child's History of England was full of grisly beheadings. Atwood remembers being curled up beside a bar heater in freezing cold Edmonton when she read it and thinking " This is the real thing - wow."ġ0. Margaret Atwood read Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, the year it was published in Canada. One night, she finally took out a copy and read it, and thought, "It's not as bad as I thought." This book went on to win the Governor General's Literary Award in 1968.ĩ. When Munro got copies of the book from her publisher, she hid them in a closet so she wouldn't have to look at them. Her first book of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was written over a 15-year span.Ĩ. Fact: Alice Munro in conversation with Diana Athill⁴ (Helen Stratton/Wikimedia Commons)ħ. Published on page 130 of The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen circa 1899. Maybe it was being Canadian, maybe it was being a woman. "Between every book I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff."ĥ. By the age of 14, she knew she wanted to be a writer. "But back then you didn't go around announcing something like that," she said. "I'm always trying," she told the Guardian in 2003. Despite her stratospheric success with the short story form, Munro often spoke of her wish to write a novel. But the problem with this scenario was that if another housewife knocked on the door, Munro couldn't really use "thinking" as an excuse to shoo the person away.Ĥ. She would think about her stories during her babies' naps before she ever put pen to paper. She thought she'd write short stories for a while, and found the form captivated her.ģ. Munro turned to short stories when she started writing because, as a housewife with three young daughters, she didn't have the time to devote to a novel. Munro was raised on what she calls a " collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm."Ģ. She was born Alice Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ont.
Here are 90 facts about her remarkable life and writing career.ġ. The Canadian writer is revered worldwide as a master of the short story, with 14 acclaimed collections and a Nobel Prize to prove it. Literary legend Alice Munro celebrates her 90th birthday on July 10, 2021.
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