OTTAWA—Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro has died at the age of 92, her publisher said on May 14.
Ms. Munro had died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, said Kristin Cochrane, chief executive officer of McClelland & Stewart.
“Alice’s writing inspired countless writers ... and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape,” she said in a statement.
Ms. Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
She was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel literature prize but the first with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but raised in Chicago and was widely seen as an American writer.
Ms. Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize—Canada’s most high-profile literary award—twice.
Alice Laidlaw was born to a hard-pressed family of farmers on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, a small town in the region of southwestern Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, and started writing in her teens.
Ms. Munro originally began writing short stories while a stay-at-home mother. She intended to someday write a novel, but said that with three children she was never able to find the time necessary. Ms. Munro began building a reputation when her stories started getting published in the New Yorker in the 1970s.
She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. They had four daughters—one died just hours after being born—before divorcing in 1972. Afterward, Ms. Munro moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.
Ms. Munro in 2009 revealed she had undergone heart bypass surgery and had been treated for cancer.
