Alice Munro (born 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer and novelist. She grew up in a lower middle class family Huron County in Southwestern Ontario and has described using reading and writing to escape the mundanity of her life, first as a daughter and then as a housewife and mother. Following a celebrated writing career that spanned the late 1960s to the early 2010s, Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her body of work in 2009, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

Munro is renowned for her depictions of the inner lives of girls and women who inhabit the rural Ontario settings that she is familiar with through lived experience. An anonymous review of her story collection Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, published in The New York Times on October 27, 1974, wrote that

Alice Munro’s subject matter is ordinariness—disappointment, the passage of time—but she doesn’t bring to her stories what, say, John Updike or Tillie Olsen do: extraordinary language, a mind in love with the everyday but able to exalt it so that we feel the magic in what is usual. Most of the stories here concern the past, hidden from others but told to us (

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