Alice Munro: Canadian Nobel Prize-Winning Author

2. Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario into a family of a farmer • Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario

3. Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July1931 • is a Canadian short-story writer, the Nobel prize winner (2013) and three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's • her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. While most of Munro’s fiction is set in Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international.

4. Themes and techniques • Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. • Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers of the U.S. rural South. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions

5. frequent theme of her work—particularly evident in her early stories—has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. • Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavour of a life in 30 pages. She tells us what it is to be a human being. She is wholly without cliché.

6. Alice Munro publishes variant versions of her stories, sometimes within a short span of time. Her works "Save the Reaper" and "Passion" came out in two different versions in the same year, in 1998 and 2004 respectively. At the other end of the scale, two stories were republished in a variant version about 30 years later, "Home" (1974/2006/2014) and "Wood" (1980/2009).[

7. In her stories, as in Chekhov's, plot is secondary, stories are lacking in events. • All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the focus is on aconcise, subtle, revelatory detail. • However, Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novel

8. In recent work such as • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and • Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly.It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to an event

9. Works • Dance of the Happy Shades – 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award for Fiction) • Lives of Girls and Women – 1971 • Who Do You Think You Are?– 1978(winner of the 1978 Governor General's Award for Fiction • The Moons of Jupiter– 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)

10. The Progress of Love– 1986 Governor General's Award • Friend of My Youth– 1990 • The Love of a Good Woman– 1998(winner of the 1998 Giller Prize) • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage– 2001 • No Love Lost – 2003 • Runaway –2004 • The View from Castle Rock – 2006 • Too Much Happiness – • Dear Life -

11. Margaret Eleanor Atwood, (born November 18, 1939) • A prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and activist • she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice.

13. Atwood is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history.While she is best known for her work as a novelist, her poetry is noteworthy,too. • Many of her poems have been inspired by myths, and fairy tales, which were an interest of hers from an early age. • Atwood has also published shortstories.

14. Novels • The Edible Woman(1969) • Surfacing (1972) • Lady Oracle(1976) • Life Before Man (1979, finalist for the Governor General's Award) • Bodily Harm(1981) • The Handmaid's Tale (1985, winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award and 1985 Governor General's Award, finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize) • Cat's Eye (1988, finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award and the 1989 Booker Prize)

15. The Robber Bride (1993, finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award) • Alias Grace (1996, winner of the 1996 Giller Prize, finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize and the 1996 Governor General's Award) • The Blind Assassin (2000, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and finalist for the 2000 Governor General's Award) • Oryx and Crake (2003, finalist for the 2003 Booker Prize and the 2003 Governor General's Award) • The Penelopiad (2005)

16. Oryx and Crake(2003, finalist for the 2003 Booker Prize and the 2003 Governor General's Award) • The Penelopiad(2005) • The Year of the Flood(September 2009, Oryx and Crake followup)

17. The Handmaid´s Tale • The Handmaid’s Tale is about the present as well as the future, suggesting that until there are significant changes in women’s and men’s understandings and social practices, society will continue to be in danger of this kind of repression • The Handmaid's Tale explores themes of women in subjugation in a patriarchal society and the various means by which these women attempt to gain individualism and independence. .

18. The Handmaid's Tale is set in the Republic of Gilead,a theonomic military dictatorship formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America.

19. The story is told in the first person by a woman called Offred. The character is one of a class of women with healthy reproductive systems, in an era of declining birth rates owing to increasing infertility. These women are forcibly assigned to produce children for the ruling class and are known as "handmaids", Offred describes her life during her third assignment as a handmaid, in this case to an important official referred to as "The Commander".

20. Interspersed with her narratives of her present-day experiences are flashback discussions of her life from before and during the beginning of the revolution, when she finds she has lost all autonomy to her husband, their failed attempt to escape to Canada, and finally her indoctrination into life as a handmaid by government-trained women called "Aunts".

21. The women are physically segregated by colour of clothing—blue, red, green, striped and white—to signify social class and assigned position, ranked highest to lowest. The Commanders' wives are dressed in blue, handmaids in red, Marthas (cooks and maids) in green. Striped clothing is for all other women (called "Econowives") who essentially do everything in the domestic sphere. Young, unmarried girls are dressed in white.

22. Much of the discussion about The Handmaid's Tale has centered on its categorization as feminist literature. Atwood does not see the Republic of Gilead as a purely feminist dystopia, as not all men have greater rights than women.[16] Instead, this society presents a typical dictatorship: "shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife

23. The Robber Bride • Exploring the paradox of female villainy, this tale of three fascinating women is another peerless display of literary virtuosity. Roz, Charis and Tony all share a wound, and her name is Zenia. Beautiful, smart and hungry, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless, Zenia is the turbulent center of the story. Over the three decades since, she has damaged each of them badly, ensnaring their sympathy, betraying their trust, and treating their men as loot. Then Zenia dies, or at any rate the three women — with much relief — attend her funeral. But as The Robber Bridebegins, Roz, Charis and Tony have come together at a trendy restaraunt for their monthly lunch when in walks the seemingly resurrected Zenia.

24. Oryx and Crake • Definedas a dystopiansciencefictionnovelAtwood has attimesdisputedthenovelbeingsciencefiction, preferring to labelitspeculativefiction and "adventure romancebecauseitdoesnotdealwith 'thingsthathavenotbeeninventedyet'andgoesbeyondtherealism. • Oryx and Crakeexploresdevelopments in science and technologysuchasxenotransplantation ( i.ethe transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another)and geneticengineering, particularlythecreationoftransgenicanimalssuchas "wolvogs" (hybridsbetweenwolves and dogs), "rakunks" (raccoon and skunk), and "pigoons" (pigswhichshaperesmblesballoons, for organ transplants.

25. Oryx and Crakedoesnotdepend on imagining new scientific or technologicaldiscoveries; thenovelmerelypresentsthebasisoftechnologiesavailabletoday and carriescurrentsocialandeconomicdevelopmentsandtheirattendantethicalchoices to theirradicalconclusions. • CoralAnnHowellsarguesthatOryx and Crakeis in someways a sequel to Atwood'sTheHandmaid'sTale in thatitcarriesthenationalcatastropheintheearliernovel to globallevel

26. Short fiction collections • Dancing Girls (1977, winner of the and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction) • Wilderness Tips (1991, finalist for the Governor General's Award) • The Labrador Fiasco (1996) • (2006) • Moral Disorder(2006)

27. Poetry • The Circle Game; Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1964 Contact Press, 1966; Anansi, 1967. • The Animals in That Country; Oxford University Press, 1969; Atlantic Little-Brown, 1968. • The Journals of Susanna Moodie; Oxford, 1970. • Procedures for Underground; Oxford, 1970; Atlantic Little-Brown, 1970. • You Are Happy; Oxford, 1974; Harper & Row, 1975. • Two-Headed Poems; Oxford, 1978. • True Stories; Oxford; 1981. • Interlunar, Oxford, 1984. • Morning in the Burned House, McClelland & Stewart, 1995;