Alice Munro: Nobel Prize Winner 2013 and study/workshop on her short story "The Office"

15th November is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon. Class will read the short story The Office by Alice Munro from the anthology Women & Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women. Writing exercises and discussion on Munro’s short stories that reveal a female character’s search for empowerment.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Alice Munro (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian author writing in English. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."

    Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario under a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

   Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories sometimes erroneously described as a novel. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States). This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980, Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a short-story collection about once every four years.

   In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story". She is the recipient of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature for her lifetime body of work, however at the age of 82, Munro cites ill health as the reason for not attending the award ceremony in Sweden in December.                                                  Resource : Wikipedia 2013