Alice Munro was born in Wingham in 1931 and spent her whole life writing about it.
For sixty years she wrote about the same handful of streets in southwestern Ontario. She called the town Jubilee. She called it Hanratty. She called it Walley. She called it Dalgleish. Her characters were farmers’ wives, small-town shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and girls trying to leave. Her subject was the underneath of ordinary life in places most Canadian fiction had ignored.
In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first author ever to receive it for the short story alone.
For decades her relationship with Wingham was complicated. Some locals felt exposed by her portraits. After the Nobel, the town reconciled. It planted the Alice Munro Literary Garden, still tended today by the Wingham Horticultural Society.
She won the Nobel Prize for writing about a place most people had never heard of. Now they have.
