Alice Munro known for mastery of short stories and depictions of womanhood in rural settings, has died in Ontario, Canada aged 92. Born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Munro grew up in a fox and mink farm, in the most disreputable part of the town. Munro found an escape in reading as a child and her favourite writers like Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Lucy Maud Montgomery guided her in appreciating literature beyond her age.

“Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic, Books are far more important to me than life”  Alice Munro said. She graduated in 1949 at Valedictorian high school  and received a two-year scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario, where she majored in journalism before switching to English.

Perpetual financial struggles forced her to work as tobacco picker, a library clerk, and even to sell her own blood while studying. She married a fellow student James Munro and moved with him to Vancouver, where they had three children  although the middle child Catherine died shortly after her birth due to kidney complication and then to Victoria in 1963, where they opened a bookstore.

Munro immersed herself in literature and her ambition to write about rural people in small towns and her breakthrough came in 1968 with the publication of her debut short story collection “ Dance of the Happy Shades”, a collection 15 of her earliest stories received critical acclaim and won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for Fiction in the same year.

Munro’s prose was semi-autobiographical in nature exploring the universality of the human urge for self-discovery, love and independence. She told CBC in 1990 “ The small town is like a stage for human lives”. She was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Tamarack Review. Munro experimented in “The Moons of Jupiter” and “The Progress of Love” traditional architecture of short stories by incorporating nonlinear structures. Several of Munro’s short stories were adapted to film including the 1983 Oscar-winning short story “Boys and Girls” and the 2006 Oscar-nominated film “Away from Her”. In 2009 Munro was treated for cancer and had undergone coronary bypass surgery. In 2012 she published her final collection of short stories “Dear Life” which portrays small-town lives, and her semi-autobiographical depictions of womanhood in rural towns.

In 2013, Munro was selected as Nobel Laureate in Literature for her body of work spanning seven decades. The Nobel Committee described Munro’s work as a “ master of the contemporary short story” whose writing captured “ the feeling of just being a human being”.

She once said “ I want my stories to move people”.