OTTAWA: Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose exquisitely crafted tales of the loves, ambitions and travails of small-town women in her native land made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, died on Monday at the age of 92.

According to her family, Munro had been suffering from dementia for a decade.

Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Her stories explored sex, yearning, discontent, aging, moral conflict and other themes in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar _ villages and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario where she lived. She was adept at fully developing complex characters within the limited pages of a short story.

Munro, who wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realism, was often likened to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian known for his brilliant short stories _ a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in honouring her with the Nobel Prize.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2024