Canadian writer Alice Munro, 2013 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has died at the age of 92.

Munro wrote short stories for over 60 years, often focusing on life in rural Canada.

She died Monday evening at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, her family and publisher confirmed.

Munro has often been compared to the Russian writer Anton Chekhov for the insight and compassion found in his stories.

“Alice Munro is a national treasure – a writer of immense depth, empathy and humanity whose work is read, admired and cherished by readers across Canada and around the world,” said Kristin Cochrane, CEO of Penguin Random House Canada, in a statement.

His first major breakthrough came in 1968, when his collection of short stories, Dance of The Happy Shades, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won Canada’s highest literary honor, the Prix du Governor General. It was the first of three Governor General’s Awards he would win during his lifetime.

Munro has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories.

In 1977, the New Yorker magazine published one of Munro’s stories, Royal Beatings, based on the punishments she received from her father when she was young. She continued to enjoy a long relationship with the publication.

Munro, the daughter of a fox breeder and a teacher, was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario. Many of his stories are set in the region and tell of the people, culture and way of life of the region.

As a youth, she was named valedictorian of her high school and received a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in London. Munro had the highest grade in English of all the students who applied to university.

While pursuing a graduate degree, Munro said she spent about half her time on academics and the other half on writing.

She has published more than a dozen collections of short stories. In the 1950s and 1960s, his stories were broadcast on the CBC and published in several Canadian periodicals.

“Born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and after a few years, women like me were wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” she said.

A well-known story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, was adapted into the 2006 film Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Lifetime Achievement Prize.

The judges said in a statement at the time: “Reading Alice Munro means learning something you’ve never thought of before.”

They added that Munro “brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to each story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels”.

She went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2013. Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway.

“Maybe I write stories that people are very involved in, maybe it’s the complexity and the lives that are presented in them,” she told the Guardian in 2013. “I I hope they’re good reads. I hope they resonate with people.”

Her latest collection of stories, Dear Life, was published in 2012. It included a collection of partly autobiographical stories.

She told the National Post newspaper that Dear Life was special because she probably wouldn’t write again.

“It’s not that I don’t like writing, but I think you get to a point where you kind of think about your life in a different way,” she said.