Alice Munro: the short-story writer who was 'as good as it gets'

Dear Life author has died aged 92

Alice Munro sits in a chair
Alice Munro had the first of many stories published in The New Yorker in 1977
(Image credit: anadian Press / Shutterstock)

Alice Munro often embarked on what she thought was a novel, only to find that the narrative petered out after about 40 pages. 

But this hardly mattered, said The New Yorker, because as the citation for her Nobel Prize in Literature put it, Munro, who has died aged 92, could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel" within a short story. She produced more than a dozen collections of them, most focused on the lives of seemingly ordinary women and girls in rural communities in southern Ontario, where she had herself grown up. 

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