Alice Munro obituary: Writer of short stories that were novels in miniature

Nobel laureate author Alice Munro, at home in Clinton, Ontario in 2013. Munro, who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to stories that dazzled. Photograph: Ian Willms/The New York TimesFew writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92.

Routinely likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, Munro was more radical than the comparison implies. AS Byatt, a longstanding admirer, described how reading Munro made her want to try short fiction herself. Munro stretched and challenged the genre. Not only does she consistently wrongfoot the reader, overturning our expectations of characters and their actions, but she melds several narrative strands together, bringing into one tale several plots.

Munro said of her fiction: “There is always a starting point in reality.” Her own starting point was the town of Wingham, Huron County, Ontario, where she was born, to Anne , a former schoolteacher, and Robert Laidlaw, a fox farmer. They are frequent presences in her stories, as is the town, which appears variously renamed as Jubilee, Dalgleish, Hanratty, Logan, Carstairs and Walley.

The View from Castle Rock contains some of Munro’s most personal stories, drawing on pieces she had been working on for years about her family history. It is an account of the pioneers from whose stock she came . But it is also something of a love letter to Ontario, a record of disappearing towns and a disappearing way of life.

Munro constantly distanced her life from her fiction. “Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think,” she wrote in the introduction to The Moons of Jupiter .

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