Canadian author Alice Munro, specialist in short stories and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, has died at the age of 92, media announced on Tuesday. Suffering from dementia for more than ten years, she died Monday evening in a retirement home in Ontario, said the Canadian daily. The Globe and Mail.
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Alice Munro became famous for her short stories rooted in rural life in Ontario, in central Canada, which earned her comparisons to 19th century Russian author Anton Chekhov. Despite success and an impressive harvest of literary prizes garnered over more than four decades of career, the author remained discreet, like her characters, mainly women, whose physical beauty her texts never highlight. An echo, perhaps, of the puritanical influences that marked his childhood.
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His first short story, The dimensions of a shadow was published in 1950, while she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. She received the Governor General of Canada’s Award for her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (The Dance of Shadows) published in 1968.
“Our Chekhov”
Alice Munro received many other awards in Canada and abroad, while her stories – often anchored in the simple life of Huron County in Ontario – appeared in prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker Or The Atlantic Monthly.
Its subjects and its style, marked by the presence of a narrator who explains the meaning of the events, have earned it the title of “ our Chekhov » by the American woman of letters of Russian origin Cynthia Ozick. One of his short stories, Far from herwas adapted for the big screen in 2006, and garnered two Oscar nominations.
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In 2009, she received the prestigious Man Booker International Prize before revealing that she had overcome cancer, an illness from which one of her heroines suffered in a short story published in February 2008 in The New Yorker.
“ Alice Munro is best known as a writer of short stories, but she brings as much depth, wisdom, and precision to each story as most novelists do to all their work », then justified the jury in awarding him this prize. “ Reading Alice Munro means learning something you hadn’t thought of before. “.