Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro dies at 92

Canadian author Alice Munro, a 2013 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has died at the age of 92. 

Munro wrote short stories for more than 60 years, often focusing on life in rural Canada.

She died at her care home in Port Hope, Ontario on Monday night, her family confirmed to the The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Munro was often compared to Russian writer Anton Chekhov for the insight and compassion found in her stories.

Her first major break-through came in 1968, when her short story collection, Dance of The Happy Shades, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won Canada’s highest literary honour, the Governor General’s Award.

In 1977, the New Yorker magazine published her first story, Royal Beatings, based on punishments she received from her father when she was young, and she went on to have a long relationship with the publication.

Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, and her stories are often set in the area, and chronicle the region’s people, culture and the way of life.

She said in an interview with the Guardian in 2013 that she had been “writing personal stories all my life”.

“Maybe I write stories that people get very involved in, maybe it is the complexity and the lives presented in them.,” she told the Guardian in 2013. “I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people.”

Munro won the Man Booker Prize International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2009 before going on to win the Nobel Prize in 2013.

In a statement at the time, the Man Booker judges said she “brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.

“To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

Her last collection of stories, “Dear Life” was published in 2012.

By BBC News