Alice Munro

Munro grew up in Wingham, a small town in southwestern Ontario, the daughter of a struggling fox and mink farmer, leaving university early when her scholarship funding ran out. She spent decades running Munro's Books, an independent bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia, with her first husband while raising three daughters and writing around domestic life.

Her stories, gathered across more than a dozen collections including Dear Life, rarely left small-town Ontario but expanded the short story's scope to cover entire lives within a handful of pages. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, the first writer honored primarily for short fiction.

After her death in 2024, her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an account revealing that Munro's second husband had sexually abused her as a child and that Munro, on learning of it years later, remained married to him, a revelation that reshaped how her body of work is read.