Alice Munro was born in Wingham, a town in southwest Ontario, Canada, in 1931, to a schoolteacher mother and a father who raised foxes, minks, and later turkeys. Her mother, socially ambitious and relatively independent, became ill with Parkinson’s during Munro’s childhood, leading to a loss of income for the family and greater responsibilities for Munro. She was awarded a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where she published her first short story, “The Dimensions of A Shadow” at age 19. After leaving college at age 21 to marry James Munro, she moved to Vancouver in western Canada. Following the birth of their first three daughters, the couple opened a bookstore together in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, which was still in business 60 years later. A fourth daughter was born in 1966. In this period, Munro began publishing books, beginning with the 1968 collection The Dance of the Happy Shades, which won Canada’s highest literary honor, the Governor General’s Award, followed quickly by 1971’s Lives of Girls and Women.  The Munros divorced in 1972. Munro returned to Ontario in 1973 to be writer-in-residence at her alma mater, marrying Gerald Fremlin in 1976. She and Fremlin moved to Clinton, Ontario, a town very like her first home of Wingham. 

Many of Munro’s short stories are set in the Canadian countryside, where she spent the majority of her life. She draws inspiration from her family's history as Scottish immigrants in Ontario along with her parents' struggles to establish a fur farm. After returning home, she began a new period of her life. She began an important professional relationship with Douglas Gibson, an influential editor who would help shape her career. He helped her to publish both Who Do You Think You Are? and The Progress of Love, her fourth and fifth books. After the success of these collections, Munro began a contract with The New Yorker, which has published sixty-two of her contributions and has remained the primary publication for her stories despite her appearing in prominent publications internationally, such as the Paris Review. Munro’s list of literary prizes is extensive, and it includes her Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

As an author, Munro is known for short stories that capture complex characters and the intricacies of their lives. Oftentimes, her stories are rich with details from her own life. Generally, her main characters are women who are well-educated and deal with relationships, internal tensions, and a range of emotions. Because of this focus, her work is renowned in feminist circles. Munro’s works often play with the traditional, chronological set-up of the short story, instead jumping back and forth in time to prioritize the emotions and reflections of characters rather than the plot itself. Many of her works build up to central questions or realizations that add depth to the deceptions of what might otherwise be mundane life.