Alice Munro, acclaimed short-story writer and Nobel Prize winner, dies at 92

Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who lent mythic proportions to the lives of ordinary people from small, rural towns like those in the Ontario countryside where she spent most of her life, has died. She was 92.

A spokesperson for the author’s publisher confirmed the death of Munro but did not immediately provide further details, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. She had been in frail health since undergoing heart surgery in 2001.

Considered by many to be the finest short-fiction writer of her generation, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013, only months after publishing a collection of stories that she said would be her last. She had already received the Man Booker International Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States and every top literary prize offered in her native Canada, including its most prestigious, the Governor General’s Award.

“Alice Munro is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries,” author Cynthia Ozick said some years