It won a Canadian Booksellers Association Award. In this book, the narrator Del Jordan explains what she hopes to achieve in writing a work of fiction about small-town life in Ontario. Lives of Girls and Women (1973) was intended as a novel, and published as one, but is in fact a collection of interlinked stories. In Canada it won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, a success she later repeated with further collections Who Do You think You Are? (1978) and The Progress of Love (1986). Fifteen of her earliest stories, many of which have autobiographical elements, were collected in her book, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968 Canada, 1974 UK). Since then many more short stories have been published regularly in prestigious periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. During the 1950s and '60s her stories were also accepted for broadcast by CBC and for publication in various journals. Her first short story was published in Folio, a student literary magazine, in 1950. She now lives in Comox, British Columbia and Clinton, Ontario. From 1963 she ran a bookshop in Victoria, British Columbia for several years, before returning to Ontario in 1972. Although not necessarily directly autobiographical, they reflect the author's own life experiences, are concerned with women's lives and are 'probably unrivalled in their fullness' (Washington Post 1998).īorn in 1931 to a farming family, Alice Munro won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where she studied from 1949-1951, but she left before graduating and moved to Vancouver. Her accessible, moving stories are set in her native Canada, in small, provincial towns like the one in which she grew up, and explore human relationships through ordinary everyday events.

Her books consist of collections of short stories, and one book which has been published as a novel, although it is actually a set of inter-linked stories which falls between the two genres. Canadian writer Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, South West Ontario and has written short fiction since 1950.

Open secrets alice munro analysis