Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and spent her girlhood summers in northern Ontario and Quebec where her entomologist father introduced her to the pleasures of unspoiled wilderness, an influence which, to this day, reappears in her much admired writings.
 

“Margaret Atwood with Mug I,” acrylic on canvas, 81x70cm, 1980 by Charles Pachter of Toronto and Miami Beach, Florida. [Painting, courtesy Charles Pachter]

A brilliant scholar, she attended the University of Toronto, Radcliffe, and Harvard. She has served as the chairperson of The Writers’ Union of Canada and has actively supported Amnesty International and P E N Canada. Margaret Atwood lives with writer Graeme Gibson and they have one daughter, Jess, who was born in the spring of 1976.

A decade after Margaret Atwood had won her first Governor General’s Award, Tom Marshall commented, in an issue of the Malahat Review dedicated to her work, that “Atwood is young enough for us to suppose that her best work is in the future.”

Thus far, Atwood, who is arguably Canada’s best-known author both in her homeland and abroad, has written more than 30 literary works and has been translated into more than 25 languages. Although she has written non-fiction and children’s literature, she is perhaps best known for her novels – The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), and The Robber Bride(1993), in addition to her numerous collections of poetry and short stories.
 

Novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic, Margaret Atwood is viewed here with former teacher and mentor, Northrop Frye, left, and, right, George Ignatieff, Chancellor, University of Toronto, when she was honoured by her alma mater in 1983 with an honorary D.Litt. [Photo, courtesy Victoria College, University of Toronto]

Atwood’s first poetry emerged in the 1950s when she, a teenager, had no inkling of modern poetry. “In high school we did not study any Canadian poets; we studied dead English people. But there were a lot of people around my age who were coming into it, who had begun to write. There were people on the west coast and people here [Toronto] in the coffee-shop movement; there was that kind of public reading going on... It was such a small community.... Something wiggled on one side of it and those on the other side felt the ripple.”

In 1972 Atwood published her ground-breaking book, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, in which her central thesis was that much Canadian literature is concerned with victimization by the natural environment.

When she won the Governor General’s Award in 1966 for The Circle Game (she won the prize a second time in 1986 for The Handmaid’s Tale), her prolific career was launched.

Several of Atwood’s works have been turned into films including the poem “The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and novels Surfacing, The Edible Woman, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood has won wide international acclaim and numerous awards, highlighted by France’s Le Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, England’s Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Ontario Trillium Award, the American Humanist of the Year Award (1987), the Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award, Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year for 1986, the Welsh Arts Council International Writer’s Prize (1982), and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction in 1986. In 1987 and 1989, she was short listed for the Booker Prize and was made Companion of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Journalist Robert Fulford, longtime editor of Saturday Night, wrote in 1977 that Atwood, as “feminist, nationalist, literary witch, mythological poet, satirist, formulator of critical theories ... is beyond question the chief literary heroine of this era.” He asked, “Who is Atwood? What is she up to? What is she up to now?” In 1995 she partly deflected a similar question in a Poetry Canada Review: “Biographically-minded people are constantly pushing interpretation towards the inner and personal and the subjective, but, in fact, a lot of what poets write about is there in the world. It’s out there, not in here. Or it may be both, but it’s certainly out there. So you’re not writing about dire things because you happen to be oriented towards dire things; you’re writing about dire things because they exist.”

Patricia Stone