This month, we are pleased to celebrate the birthday of Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor, Margaret Atwood. Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Inspired by myths and fairy tales, Atwood started writing plays and poems when she was six years old.
She didn’t attend school full time until she was twelve years old. As a girl, she participated in the Brownie Program for the Girl Guides of Canada. By the age of sixteen, she had decided to pursue a writing career.
She attended Victoria College of the University of Toronto. Many of her stories and poems were published in the college literary journal. She began her graduate studies at Radcliffe College, then the sister school to Harvard University. After earning her M.A., she entered the doctoral program, but didn’t complete her dissertation.
Atwood’s first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published in 1961. While establishing her writing career, she was a lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She worked as an instructor in English at the George Williams University in Montreal, and the University of Alberta.
During the 1970s, she taught at York University in Toronto and published six collections of poetry, three novels, and a short story collection.
Her work has been labeled science fiction, but Atwood insists she writes speculative fiction because everything she writes about is possible and has been tried in some form or other. Atwood also bristles at the notion of being called a feminist because the definition of the work has been subjected to so many different interpretations. She prefers to be considered a humanist because we should all be treated as equal human beings with the same rights, concerns, and needs. She also rejects the notion that her work is autobiographical.
Atwood’s best known and highly acclaimed novel, The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985. She lectured and taught in the United States and Australia during the 1980s. Going into the 1990s, she continued to feature female characters who exemplified both good and evil qualities insisting that women as a gender were not inherently good or inherently evil. The themes of her work include the theory of Canadian identity, the relationships between men and women, the most powerful and the most vulnerable, and the abuses of power by political leaders.
Since 1961, she has published eighteen books of poetry, eighteen novels, eleven books of nonfiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, nine collections of short fiction, and several small press editions of poetry and fiction. Atwood has won the Franz Kafka Prize, two Booker Prizes, the Governor General's Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Many of her works have been adapted for stage and the big screen.
Atwood was married for five years to Jim Polk, an American writer. After her divorce, she began a relationship with Canadian author Graeme Gibson. They had a daughter and remained to together until his death in 2019.
Atwood is credited with inventing the LongPen, a device that allows a person to write in ink remotely from anywhere in the world via tablet, PC, and the internet. She initially came up with the idea to allow her to autograph books for her fans around the world. The company she formed expanded into providing services for business and legal transactions.
She is still writing and remains active in the writing community with PEN International, a group originally formed to help free politically imprisoned writers. She has covered the war in Ukraine and publishes information about the war on her social media. Atwood is also active in Climate Words, an organization dedicated to bridging gaps in climate communication to aid in public awareness of the dangers of climate change. In addition she supports human rights and animal rights.
“Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some.” From The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Novels by Margaret Atwood:
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Life Before Men (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Cat’s Eye (1988)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Onyx and Crake (2003)
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Year of the Flood (2009)
MaddAddam (2013)
Scribbler Moon (2014)
The Heart Goes Last (2015)
Hag-Seed (2016)
Testaments (1019)
Photo Credit:
By Collision Conf - PO1_7718, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155285789