Alice Munro 1931 -2024

The Nobel prize winner whose masterly accounts of ordinary lives in smalltown Canada elevated the short story into the highest form of literature

- Lisa Allardice

Back in 2006, I visited Alice Munro in Ontario to interview her for the publication of her collection The View from Castle Rock. She had sworn off any future publicity and claimed she didn't plan on writing much longer - two more collections followed, along with the International Man Booker and Nobel prizes. She was a mere 74 then. The cult of Munro was something of a members only club at that point, with writers such as fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood (with whom she was friends for more than 45 years) and the late AS Byatt among her admirers, along with relative young guns such as Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore.

As far back as 1997 the New Yorker critic James Wood declared her "such a good writer that nobody bothers any more to judge her goodness... her reputation is like a good address". In 2004, in one of the most deliriously compelling pieces of criticism ever written, Franzen urged people to "Read Munro! Read Munro!", anointing her "the Great One". Atwood noted Munro's ascension to "international literary sainthood" in 2008.