The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro

Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books – Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; and Runaway - as well as Selected Stories, an anthology of stories culled from her dazzling body of work.

During her distinguished career, she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Award in the U.K., for the year’s best book, and, in the U.S., the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and, in 2005, the U.S. National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.

In Canada, her prize-winning record is extraordinary -including three Governor General’s Awards; several Libris Awards, given by the country’s booksellers; the Trillium Book Award; the Jubilee Prize; and two Giller Prizes.

Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in, as demonstrated by the reviewers’ quotes on the back of the book. In 2005, she was included in Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people, and she has been frequently mentioned as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, (in “Alice Munro country”) Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.