Alice Munro ~Canadian Short-Story Writer

"My mother has told me that until she was twenty-three or so her writing was consciously imitative.  She wanted to write like VirginiaWoolf or Henry James, exploring the minute problems in people's lives, trying to get at some ineffable experience.  She wanted to capture some atmosphere about a place, some feeling that was important, to get at 'the exact texture of how things are.' "

Later in life Alice would say that all her writing was "in essence autobiographical."  Her writing was about "human life."
"She could not understand how writers choose a time and then write about that, or consciously choose symbols.  Her desire is to enter into the experience of other people, to gain access to realities other than her own, to pull away a curtain and reveal 'some dazzling mystery.'  The critic and writer Kent Thompson put his finger on her particular genius during a CBC Radio panel discussion when he said,

'She imagines reality accurately.'"

~ Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers & Daughters, Growing Up with Alice Munro, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2001.  A. Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931.  Winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, the Governor General's Award and perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.