The Canadian short-story writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro has died aged 92 at her care home in Ontario.

She had suffered from dementia for more than a decade.

Once called “the Canadian Chekhov” by Cynthia Ozick, Munro’s body of work was founded on forms and subjects traditionally disregarded by the literary mainstream.

Fellow country woman Margaret Atwood described her as “among the major writers of English fiction of our time.” Salman Rushdie praised her as “a master of the form” while Jonathan Franzen once wrote: “[Munro] is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”

The famed short story writer began published in the 60s, but it was not until her later career that her work was recognised. She won the O Henry short story award in 2006, The Man Booker in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

She received her Man Booker prize at Trinity College Dublin.

Ms Munro is known for setting her acute stories in the rural Ontario countryside where she grew up, focusing a searing lens on the frailties of the human condition.

Born in Ontario during the Depression in 1931, to chicken farmers, Munro went on to study English at Journalism at the University of Western Ontario under scholarship.

Munro began writing while studying at the University of western Ontario, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950.

She married James Munro a year later, and went on to have four daughters: Sheila, Catherine, Jenny and Andrea. Catherine died the day of her birth due to a kidney dysfunction.

In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. The couple divorced in 1972.

Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario, and in 1976 received an honorary LLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met in her time as an undergrad.

The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88.

In 2009 Munro revealed that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary-artery bypass surgery. It is reported that she had been suffering from dementia for at leats twelve years prior to her death.