Alice Munro was the English language’s Chekhov

The daughter of a silver-fox and mink farmer, Ms Munro (pictured) was brought up in rural Ontario. As a girl, she was told that the worst thing you could do was to “call attention to yourself” or “think you were smart”. She enrolled at the University of Western Ontario to study journalism but dropped out when her scholarship money dried up. Ms Munro married young and moved to Vancouver, where her husband worked as a manager in a department store. She had four daughters. One, born with defective kidneys, died in infancy.