Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published across many forms: 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, two graphic novels, and small press editions of poetry and fiction. Her career belongs to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a period in which Canadian literature gained wider attention, and Atwood became one of its most closely watched voices.

Atwood is best known for her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1985 Governor General’s Award, and a finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize. She has described the book as science fiction, or more precisely speculative fiction, while noting that she did not include anything “that somebody somewhere hadn’t already done.” Her other major novels include The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), and Cat’s Eye (1988). A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Her writing began early. Atwood started writing plays and poems at age 6 and decided at 16 that she wanted to write professionally. Much of her childhood was spent in the backwoods of northern Quebec because of her father’s work in forest entomology, with travel between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 12, but she read widely: literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. Myths and fairy tales interested her from a very early age and later helped shape many of her poems.

Atwood studied at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana and took part in The Bob Revue. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with an honours degree in English and minors in philosophy and French, then earned a master’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1962. Her first poetry book, Double Persephone, appeared in 1961 and won the E. J. Pratt Medal. In 1966, The Circle Game won the Governor General’s Award.

Across her work, Atwood returned to gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, genetic engineering, and power politics. She also helped build literary institutions, as a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and she is a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. Beyond writing, she invented the LongPen device and related technologies for remote robotic writing of documents. Her words continue to speak because they join sharp imagination to real human systems, social pressure, belief, fear, and the ways people use language to control or resist one another.