Alice Ann Munro, née Laidlaw (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer and three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. Widely considered "the finest living short story writer," her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. While most of Munro’s fiction is set in Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."