Background

Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, as the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist and Margaret Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia. Because of her father's ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec and travelling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto.

Education

Margaret did not attend school full-time until she was eight years old. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957. Atwood began writing plays and poems at the age of six.

Atwood realized she wanted to write professionally when she was sixteen. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal, and participated in the sophomore theatrical tradition of The Bob Comedy Revue. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.

In 1961 Atwood began graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued doctoral studies for two years, but did not finish her dissertation, "The English Metaphysical Romance".

Career

Margaret's reviews and critical articles have appeared in various eminent magazines and she has also edited many books, including The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1983) and, with Robert Weaver, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986). She has been a full-time writer since 1972, first teaching English, then holding a variety of academic posts and writer residencies. She was President of the Writers Union of Canada from 1981-1982 and President of PEN, Canada from 1984-1986. Her first publication was a book of poetry, The Circle Game (1964), which received the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry (Canada). Several more poetry collections have followed, including Interlunar (1988), Morning in the Burned House (1995) and Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-1995 (1998). Her books of short fiction include Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1982), Wilderness Tips (1991) and Good Bones (1992).

Margaret is perhaps best known, however, for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. Her first novel was The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten. This was followed by: Surfacing (1973), which deals with a woman's investigation into her father's disappearance; Lady Oracle (1977); Life Before Man (1980); Bodily Harm (1982), the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist recuperating on a Caribbean island; and The Handmaid's Tale (1986), a futuristic novel describing a woman's struggle to break free from her role. She subsequently published Cat's Eye (1989), dealing with the subject of bullying among young girls; The Robber Bride (1993); Alias Grace (1996), the tale of a woman who is convicted for her involvement in two murders about which she claims to have no memory; The Blind Assassin (2000), a multi-layered family memoir; and Oryx and Crake (2003), a vision of a scientific dystopia, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. Alias Grace, The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; The Blind Assassin won this prize in 2000.

In early 2004, while on the paperback tour in Denver for her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, what would later be known as the LongPen, that would enable a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet, thus allowing her to conduct her book tours without being physically present. She quickly founded a company, Unotchit Inc., to develop, produce and distribute this technology. By 2011, Unotchit Inc. shifted its market focus into business and legal transactions and was producing a range of products, for a variety of remote writing applications, based on the LongPen technologies and renamed itself to Syngrafii Inc. As of September 2014, Atwood is still Co-founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. and holder of various patents related to the LongPen technology.

Some of Margaret Atwood's books have been adapted for stage and screen. A television series based on Alias Grace was broadcast in 2017, and a television film for The Robber Bride appeared in 2007. The Edible Woman has been staged, while The Handmaid's Tale has been adapted for screen by Harold Pinter in a film directed by Volker Schloendorf, released in 1990, staged as an opera by Poul Ruders - the British Premiere was performed by English National Opera at the Coliseum, London, in April 2003 - and became a television series in 2017. She has lived in many places including Canada, England, Scotland and France, and currently lives in Toronto.

Her recent books are: Stone Mattress (2014), a collection of short stories; MaddAddam (2013), concluding the dystopian trilogy started with Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009); The Heart Goes Last (2015) and Hag-Seed (2016). In 2011, she published a book of essays about science-fiction, entitled In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and The Human Imagination.

Achievements

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  One of Canada's most distinguished person of letters, Margaret Eleanor Atwood is an internationally famous novelist, poet, critic, and politically committed cultural activist. She has published seventeen books of poetry, sixteen novels, ten books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood and her writing have won numerous awards and honors including the Man Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents.
  
  Margaret Atwood has been presented with the Order of Ontario and the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit. She holds numerous honorary degrees (e.g., from Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the Sorbonne), and has won more than 55 awards in Canada and internationally.
  
  

Works

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  • The Circle Game 1969
  • The Edible Woman 1969
  • Surfacing 1972
  • Lady Oracle 1976
  • Life Before Man 1980
  • Bodily Harm 1981
  • The Handmaid's Tale 1987
  • Cat's Eye 1988
  • The Robber Bride 1993
  • Alias Grace: A Novel 1996
  • The Blind Assassin: A Novel 2000
  • Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy) 2003
  • The Penelopiad (Canongate Myths) 2005
  • The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam Trilogy) 2009
  • MaddAddam (MaddAddam Trilogy) 2013
  • The Heart Goes Last: A Novel 2015
  • Hag-Seed 2017

Religion

Margaret said about religion: "Religion is not the tincture that poisons our social systems. It is we- we who interpret it (or let others interpret it for us) that can deliver goodness or harm in how we manage and apply religion. I have so many beloved friends in my social justice circles-activists, academics, nonprofit leaders- who describe themselves as recovering from religion. I get it. I hear their stories and I know why they left. I support them."

She shared her convictions on the role of religion and of human error in the development of societies:

"I sometimes hear the view that the world's ills are due to religions. Some people have that view. I do not agree with that view because atheist regimes have done a good job of oppressing and murdering people too. It is true that Christianity has got some dark moments. And it's had some dark moments in Canada. Dark moments of various kinds. But I don't think you can put that down to a religion. I think you can put that down to human beings behaving the way they unfortunately sometimes do - whatever religion or non-religion they may happen to have."

"One thing that has happened over the past 77 years, which is the number I have been on this planet, is that the centre of Christianity abdicated. I think a lot of people left the church who were the stable centre and that created space for more extreme people to come in and create a power base for themselves."

Politics

Atwood has indicated in interviews that she considers herself a Red Tory in the historical sense of the term. In the 2008 federal election, she attended a rally for the Bloc Québécois, a Quebec separatist party, because of her support for their position on the arts, and stated that she would vote for the party if she lived in a riding in Quebec in which the choice was between the Bloc and the Conservatives. In an editorial in The Globe and Mail, she urged Canadians to vote for any other party to stop a Conservative majority.

Views

Theory of Canadian identity. Atwood's contributions to the theorizing of Canadian identity have garnered attention both in Canada and internationally. Her principal work of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, is considered somewhat outdated, but remains a standard introduction to Canadian literature in Canadian Studies programs internationally. The continued reprinting of Survival by Anansi Press has been criticized as a view-narrowing disservice to students of Canadian Literature by some critics, including Professor Joseph Pivato.

In Survival, Atwood postulates that Canadian literature, and by extension Canadian identity, is characterized by the symbol of survival. This symbol is expressed in the omnipresent use of "victim positions" in Canadian literature. These positions represent a scale of self-consciousness and self-actualization for the victim in the "victor/victim" relationship. The "victor" in these scenarios may be other humans, nature, the wilderness or other external and internal factors which oppress the victim. Atwood's Survival bears the influence of Northrop Frye's theory of garrison mentality; Atwood uses Frye's concept of Canada's desire to wall itself off from outside influence as a critical tool to analyze Canadian literature. According to her theories in works such as Survival and her exploration of similar themes in her fiction, Atwood considers Canadian literature as the expression of Canadian identity. According to this literature, Canadian identity has been defined by a fear of nature, by settler history, and by unquestioned adherence to the community.

Feminism. Atwood's work has been of interest to feminist literary critics, despite Atwood's unwillingness at times to apply the label feminist to her works. Starting with the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman, Atwood asserted, "I don't consider it feminism; I just consider it social realism." Despite her rejection of the label at times, critics have analyzed the sexual politics, use of myth and fairy tale, and gendered relationships in her work through the lens of feminism. She later clarified her discomfort with the label feminism by stating, "I always want to know what people mean by that word (feminism). Some people mean it quite negatively, other people mean it very positively, some people mean it in a broad sense, other people mean it in a more specific sense. Therefore, in order to answer the question, you have to ask the person what they mean." Speaking to The Guardian, she said "For instance, some feminists have historically been against lipstick and letting transgender women into women’s washrooms. Those are not positions I have agreed with", a position she repeated to The Irish Times. In January 2018 Atwood penned the op-ed "Am I A Bad Feminist?" for The Globe and Mail. The piece was in response to social media backlash related to Atwood's signature on a 2016 petition calling for an independent investigation into the firing of Steven Galloway, a former University of British Columbia professor accused of sexual harassment and assault by a student. While feminist critics denounced Atwood for her support of Galloway, Atwood asserts that her signature was in support of due process in the legal system. She has been criticized for her comments surrounding the #MeToo movement, particularly that it is a "symptom of a broken legal system."

Animal rights. Margaret Atwood repeatedly makes observations about the relationship of humans to animals in her works. A large portion of the dystopia Atwood creates in Oryx and Crake rests upon the genetic modification and alteration of animals and humans, resulting in hybrids such as pigoons, rakunks, wolvogs, and Crakers, which function to raise questions on the limits and ethics of science and technology, as well as questions on what it means to be human.

Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, and she and Graeme Gibson are the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada's most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: "When people ask if there's hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it's become a symbol of hope." Atwood has been chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and helped to found the Canadian English-Speaking chapter of PEN International, a group originally started to free politically imprisoned writers. She held the position of PEN Canada president in the mid 1980s and was the 2017 recipient of the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award. Despite calls for a boycott by Gazan students, Atwood visited Israel and accepted the $1,000,000 Dan David Prize along with Indian author Amitav Ghosh at Tel Aviv University in May 2010. Atwood commented that "we don't do cultural boycotts."

Quotations: "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

"A word after a word after a word is power."

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

"Gardening is not a rational act."

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."

"War is what happens when language fails."

"We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly."

Membership

Margaret Atwood is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow Royal Society of Literature.

She is also a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988).

Margaret is the joint honorary president of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International.

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  Royal Society of Canada , Canada

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences

  1988

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  Royal Society of Literature

Personality

Although she is an accomplished writer, Margeret Atwood claims to be a terrible speller.

Physical Characteristics: Height - 5' 4" (163 cm)

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Franz Kafka

• Writers

  In childhood, she became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories and comic books.
  
  Is a big fan of George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eight-Four" and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982).

• Music & Bands

  Drake

Connections

In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer; they divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976. The family returned to Toronto in 1980.

Father:

Carl Edmund Atwood

(1909 - January 5, 1993)

Mother:

Margaret Dorothy Killam

(née Killam)

She was a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia.

Spouse:

Jim Polk

(married 1968–1973)

Brother:

Harold Leslie Atwood

(born February 15, 1937, Montreal, Canada)

Sister:

Ruth Atwood

(born 1951)

Daughter:

Eleanor Atwood Gibson

(born May 1976)

Partner:

Graeme Gibson

(born 9 August 1934)

He is a Canadian novelist.

References

• Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism
• Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Ad Feminam : Women and Literature)
• Violent duality: A study of Margaret Atwood
• The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Rosemary Sullivan (1998-07-01)
• Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. (Costerus New) by Fiona Tolan (2007-05-31)
• Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers)