Alice Munro

One of Canada's most lauded writers, Alice Munro has been heralded as a modern master of the short-story form. Raised in rural Ontario, Munro began publishing her fiction during the early 1950s, though her first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, didn't see the light of day until 1968. Met with considerable acclaim, the book prompted the author to pursue literature more actively, leading to numerous subsequent story volumes. Often favorably compared to American Southern Gothic tales, Munro's stories tend to focus on the complex emptions of Canadian women dealing with love and life. Although Munro's writing has been adapted in to television and film productions occasionally over the years, no adaptation reached a wide audience until actress, director and fellow Canadian Sarah Polley translated the story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" into the feature film "Away from Her" (2006), which yielded two Oscar nominations. Over the years, Munro won many prestigious awards and announced her retirement during the summer of 2013, but that didn't stop generations of readers, both old and new, from marveling at her richly emotional stories.