Born in Wingham, Huron County, Ontario, Canada
Ancestors 
Daughter of Robert Eric Laidlaw
and Anne Clarke (Chamney) Laidlaw
Sister of
William Laidlaw and Sheila Laidlaw
Wife of
James Armstrong Munro CM
— married
1951 in Ontario, Canada
Wife of
Gerald Fremlin
— married
1976 in Ontario, Canada
Mother of
Catherine Munro
Died
at age 92
in Port Hope, Northumberland, Ontario, Canada
Profile last modified
| Created 10 Jul 2014
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Biography
Alice (Laidlaw) Munro is Notable.
Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian author. The recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, she is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction.
The locus of Munro’s fiction is her native southwestern Ontario. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style.
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 a student at the University of Western Ontario. 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. In 1963 the couple moved to Victoria where they opened "Munro's Books" which still operates.
In 1976 she married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died in April 2013.
In 2002, Alice's daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.
Sources
- James Munro obituary[1]
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L > Laidlaw | M > Munro > Alice Ann (Laidlaw) Munro
Categories: Ontario, Authors | Nobel Laureates | Persons of National Historic Significance | Huron County, Ontario | Canada, Notables | Notables
Her first marriage ended after two decades. In 1973, she moved back to Ontario, where she reconnected with Gerald Fremlin, a friend from her university days. They were married in 1976 and lived in Clinton, Ontario, in the house where he grew up, half an hour from her hometown.
In 2013 at age 81, after weathering coronary bypass surgery, cancer treatment and the death of her second husband, Munro announced that she was retiring. Later that year, she won the Nobel Prize. She celebrated the award as a validation of the form to which she had dedicated her writing life.
In Munro’s final collection, “Dear Life,” published in 2012, the author turned her unflinching gaze on herself in four haunting autobiographical sketches.
In the last of these, she wrote: “I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”
Jennifer Maloney, Alice Munro, Prolific Short-Story Author and Nobel Laureate, Has Died at 92, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 15, 2024, pg. A8.
edited by Richard (Jordan) J
edited by Cindy Alexander
FindAGrave Memorial (accessed 14 May 2024) Memorial page for Alice Ann Laidlaw Munro (10 Jul 1931-13 May 2024).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/books/alice-munro-dead.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/alice-munro-author-dead-obit-1.7203737
edited by Aaron Gullison