Alice Munro, Huron County Nobel Laureate, dies at age 92
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Huron County native who made a career out of committing rural Ontario’s stories to paper, has passed away at the age of 92.
Her family shared the news of her passing on Monday night at her care home in Ontario with The Globe and Mail. Munro had been living with dementia for over a decade.
For years, Munro was a fixture of Huron County life, maintaining a home in Clinton and frequenting restaurants and coffee shops in Blyth and Goderich while also regularly patronizing the Blyth Festival theatre shows.
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham in 1931. She would go on to study at the University of Western Ontario before moving to British Columbia with James Munro, her first husband. There, they would open Munro’s Books in Victoria, which still operates today.
Over the course of her career, which spanned over 50 years, Munro published over a dozen original short story collections, many of which were lauded by readers and critics alike and won awards. Three times she won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was nominated twice more. She’s won the Giller Prize twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Trillium Book Award and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
In 2013, Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was hailed as a “master of the contemporary short story.” Two years later, Canada Post would issue a special Munro stamp to celebrate her Nobel Prize win.
Munro only wrote one play over the course of her career, entitled How I Met My Husband. It was staged as part of the 1976 Blyth Festival, its second season. It was scheduled to be part of the 2020 Festival season, but those plans were dashed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Festival has not revisited the play since.
Her 2001 collection, entitled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage spawned a pair of creative works. Away From Her, the 2006 film, earned Academy Award nominations for star Julie Christie and director and writer Sarah Polley and was based on “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” while Marcia Johnson adapted one of the book’s stories into Courting Johanna, a play that would grace the Blyth Festival stage during the 2008 season.
Munro was an early supporter of the Blyth Festival, championing it any chance she had. She was even named an Honorary Chairperson for the capital campaign for a new addition to Memorial Hall, which now houses the current entrance to the hall, the Bainton Gallery (home of the Blyth Festival Art Gallery) and the box office.
Long heralded as a champion for her home community, Munro would often set her stories in Huron County, telling the stories of the area and its people, usually focusing on women and girls. She was lauded by her fellow writers who praised her craftsmanship and precision in writing. Munro will forever stand as one of the true masters of the devilishly difficult form of the short story.
In 1968, Munro published her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, which won her the Governor General’s Award, followed by the revered Lives of Girls and Women in 1971. She continued, consistently writing a book every four years or so, with Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), The Progress of Love (1986), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and Dear Life (2012). Dance of the Happy Shades, Who Do You Think You Are? and The Progress of Love all won Governor General’s Awards.
In the wake of her Nobel Prize win, several Huron County municipalities have sought to celebrate her achievements and share in the success, commissioning benches, parks, signs, plaques and more. Furthermore, the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story has become one of the county’s premier arts festivals, attracting authors like Emma Donoghue, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood to events over the years.
In the hours after news of Munro’s passing broke, the Township of North Huron passed along its condolences.
“On behalf of the Township of North Huron, we are deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. Alice was highly regarded in her hometown of Wingham and has had an immense impact on our community. Her deep roots in our township are woven into the fabric of North Huron with tributes in the community such as the Alice Munro Literary Garden and the Alice Munro Public Library,” the statement reads.
“Born in Wingham in 1931, Alice was renowned internationally as one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honoured short story writers. Alice won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Alice won many literary honours, including three Governor General’s Awards, two Giller Prizes and the Man Booker International Prize.
“On behalf of our community, I would like to extend sincere condolences to Alice Munro’s family, loved ones and friends. Today in North Huron, our community is mourning together along with the rest of the world. The Township of North Huron will fly its flags at half-mast in an act of honour and respect, expressing a collective sense of sorrow shared by all,” said Reeve Paul Heffer in the statement.
On Wednesday morning, Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt offered his thoughts on behalf of the Festival.
“It’s with a heavy heart that [the] Blyth Festival joins the world in grieving the passing of the singular Alice Munro,” Garratt said in a statement posted to the Festival’s social media feeds. “Alice had a profound impact on the Festival from the very beginning and was a dear friend of the Festival family.
“In 1976, our second season ever, Alice adapted her own short story, ‘How I Met My Husband’, for the Blyth stage, premiering the work to local acclaim, and stitching herself into the fabric of this place. In the years that followed, Alice was a staunch supporter, a dedicated volunteer who took tickets and ushered in our aisles, and she even appeared as an actor on stage in the 1980s.
“Blyth also had the privilege of developing and producing Alice’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage for the stage, adapted by playwright Marcia Johnson (Courting Johanna) in 2008.
“Her artistry, her careful but unflinching words, and her belief in the beauty and complexity of this place (our home in Huron County), have long been beacons for artists here in Blyth. So too has her example in standing against the censors in the 1970s school board book bannings that targeted her collection Lives of Girls and Women, a time that feels all too fresh today.
“Our hearts go out to her family in this time. The tide has taken a titan from our shores.”