Munro attended the University of Western Ontario and, after two years, left school and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). It is one of three of her collections—the other two being Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; also published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose) and The Progress of Love (1986)—awarded the annual Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Her second collection—The Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a group of coming-of-age stories—was followed by Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My Youth (1986), A Wilderness Station (1994), and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). Her book Open Secrets (1994) contains stories that range in setting from the semicivilized hills of southern Ontario to the mountains of Albania. In Runaway (2004) Munro explores the depths of ordinary lives, and The View from Castle Rock (2007) combines history, family memoir, and fiction into narratives of questionable inquiries and obscure replies.

Munro's short story about the domestic erosions of Alzheimer's disease, "The Bear Came over the Mountain," which was originally published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), was made into the critically acclaimed film Away from Her (2006).