'Looking Back with Alice Munro'

In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’, the young narrator, walking with her father on the shores of Lake Huron, struggles to imagine a time before and after her own lifespan. At the end of the 20th century, she thinks, she will be ‘barely alive’. When Alice Munro wrote those words, she was already in her mid-thirties, an author of short stories in small circulation literary magazines. In 2015, she is indeed, as the narrator puts it, ‘old, old’; but she is a Nobel prize winner, feted by her peers. What happened in between those years, and why is Alice Munro so important a figure in world literature? How does Dance of the Happy Shades reveal her abiding themes and her distinctive approach to the short story form? And how do we re-evaluate those stories from a 21st century perspective?