(Montreal) The great Canadian author Alice Munro, specialist in short stories and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, has died at the age of 92.
She died Monday evening in the province of Ontario in central Canada, where most of these stories took place, her editor told AFP.
Described by the Swedish Academy as a “mistress of the contemporary short story”, capable of “accommodating all the epic complexity of the novel in a few short pages”, she had elevated this literary form to the rank of art.
However, despite this success and an impressive harvest of literary prizes garnered over more than four decades of career, Alice Munro remained discreet, like her characters, mainly women, whose physical beauty her texts never highlight. .
“I think all life can be interesting,” she said in an interview after receiving her Nobel Prize.
“The world has lost one of its greatest writers. We will miss her deeply,” declared Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, publishing a photo on X alongside her.
She was “a writing virtuoso” for the Minister of Culture Pascale St-Onge. “For six decades, his stories have captivated readers in Canada and around the world. She remains the only Canadian to have ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature,” she said.
Alice Munro said becoming a writer had been her dream since she was a teenager in the mid-1940s. “But in those days you couldn’t announce that sort of thing. You shouldn’t draw attention to yourself. Maybe it had something to do with being Canadian, or being a woman. Maybe both,” she said in an interview.
His first short story, The dimensions of a shadow, was published in 1950, while she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. From 1968 to 2012, this woman of letters wrote 14 collections of short stories (Fugitives, Too much happiness, Nothing but life). Divorces, remarriages, complicated returns home: in twenty to thirty pages, they condense seemingly banal existences.
“She was the greatest short story writer of our time. She was exceptional as a writer and as a human being,” David Staines, professor of literature and long-time friend, told AFP.
Many of these writings, violent and beautiful stories, have been published in prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker Or The Atlantic Monthly.
Sense of derision
“I started writing short stories because life didn’t leave me time for a novel,” she said with her unique sense of derision.
“She is our Chekhov and will outlive most of our contemporaries,” predicted the great American novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick.
Margaret Atwood, another great Canadian author, described this “tremendous woman” as a pioneer a few years ago. “The path to the Nobel was not easy for her: the chances of a literary star emerging in her time and from rural Ontario were almost zero.”
Alice Munro, who grew up with an abusive father who raised foxes and poultry, and a schoolteacher mother who died prematurely of Parkinson’s disease, also won the international Man Booker Prize in 2009. As well as the Giller Prize – the literary prize the most prestigious in Canada – twice.
In 2009, Alice Munro revealed that she had undergone heart bypass surgery and was treated for cancer.
His news The Bear crossed the mountain – taken from A little, a lot, not at allretranslated in 2019 by the Frenchwoman Agnès Desarthe – was adapted for the cinema under the title Far from herwith Julie Christie as an Alzheimer’s patient.