Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

"Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made last" Observer "Alice Munro's stories, Friend of My Youth, are wonderful: intricate, deep, full of absorbing and funny detail, and opening into painful and tender memories with cunningly concealed skill " Independent on Sunday "She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries" -- Cynthia Ozick "Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability...an unrivalled chronicler of human nature under a vast span of aspects, moods and pressures" Sunday Times "The particular brilliance of Alice Munro is that in range and depth her short stories are almost novels" Daily Telegraph