Munro, Alice Ann (1931– )

Canadian short-story writer. Her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1964), won wide critical acclaim. This and later collections – such as Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974) and The Progress of Love (1986) – established her internationally as one of the finest short-story writers of her age, and Runaway (2004) earned her Canada's Giller Prize. The novel The Beggar Maid (in fact a collection of closely related stories) appeared in 1979. In 2001 she won the Rea Award for lifetime achievement, a prize honouring the art of the short story.

Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, in Canada, and her stories are often set in small-town Ontario. Understated and closely observed, they typically depict the events of everyday life, usually seen through a woman's eyes, with a keen awareness of the pain of failure and the vulnerability of relationships – what she has called the ‘pain of human contact’. Though she is not explicitly a feminist writer, she has depicted with skill, sensitivity, and honesty the lives of women coming to terms with their many roles in a largely male world.

She has published her stories widely, notably in the New Yorker, and during the 1970s was writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario. She published her novel Lives of Girls and Women in 1971. Her other short-story collections include The Moons of Jupiter (1983), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), The Love of a Good Woman (1998), and The View from Castle Rock (2004).