Alice Munro — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

A short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for prose that moved through time in quiet, exact sentences set mostly in southwestern Ontario. Two months after her death, her daughter revealed that Munro had known since 1992 that her second husband sexually abused the daughter as a child, and stayed with him.

Biography

About

Alice Ann Munro was born 10 July 1931 in Huron County, southwestern Ontario, where she would set most of her fiction. Her short stories explored human complexities in meticulous, simple prose that moved forward and backward in time, often in integrated cycles. She won Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction three times, the Man Booker International Prize in 2009, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She stopped writing around 2013 and died at her home 13 May 2024. Two months later her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that Munro's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Alice Munro

Alice Munro

said2012

The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances.

— Dear Life (2012)

Alice Munro

said2009

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

— "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

Alice Munro

said2009

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

— "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

Alice Munro

said2009

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood: that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

— "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

Alice Munro

said2004

This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon.

— Runaway (2004)

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Gallery