Runaway: Stories

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, a rural community that closely resembles many of the communities depicted in Runaway. Her father was a fox farmer, and her mother was a teacher. Munro attended the University of Western Ontario on a scholarship in 1949, studying English and beginning to publish short stories in student publications. Her marriage to James Munro in 1951 led her to British Columbia, where she balanced writing with raising three daughters. The couple opened a bookstore in Victoria.

Munro’s first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), established her as a writer. It won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor, and marked the beginning of a career dedicated almost entirely to short fiction. Later collections, such as Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), The Progress of Love (1986), and Runaway (2004), displayed her use of narrative structure, psychological observation, and ability to transform seemingly ordinary lives into explorations of memory, desire, and change. She later divorced James Munro, returned to Ontario, and married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer who supported her work and with whom she lived until his death.