Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Eleanor Atwood, OC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian writer. A prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and political activist, she has received recognition nationally and internationally for her writing.

1 Life
2 Work
3 Literary works
4 Trivia
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Life

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Atwood was the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, a zoologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killiam, a former dietician and nutritionist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Ontario, and back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. She did not complete a full year of school until grade eight. She became a voracious reader of refined literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books.

Atwood began writing at age sixteen. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. 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 the fall of 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately-printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg professor of English.

In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She married fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. (Graeme Gibson had two sons, Matt and Grae, from a previous marriage.) She returned to Toronto in 1980.

She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.

[edit] Work

Atwood has written thematically diverse novels from a number of genres and traditions, including speculative fiction and Southern Ontario Gothic. She is often described as a feminist writer, as issues of gender often (but not always) appear prominently in her work. Her work has focused on Canadian national identity, Canada’s relations with the United States and Europe, human rights issues, environmental issues, the Canadian wilderness, the social myths of femininity, representations of women’s bodies in art, women’s social and economic exploitation, as well as women’s relations with each other and with men (Howells 163). In her novel Oryx and Crake and in recent essays, she has demonstrated great interest in (and wariness of) unchecked biotechnology.

As a literary critic, she is best known as author of the seminal Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), which is credited with sparking renewed interest in Canadian literature in the 1970s. She also wrote several television scripts, The Servant Girl (1974) and Days of the Rebels: 1815-1840 (1977).

Atwood has been vice-chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada president of International PEN (1984-1986), an international pressure group committed to freeing writers who are political prisoners. Elected a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, she has sixteen honorary degrees, including a doctorate from Victoria College (1987), and was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2001. Her literary papers are housed at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

[edit] Literary works

[edit] Anthologies edited

[edit] Other short stories

[edit] Children's books

Up in the Tree (1978)
Anna's Pet (1980)
For the Birds (1990) (with Shelly Tanaka)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] Trivia

An authorized portrait of Atwood, "Margaret Atwood Idea-Idea" (1998), by Canadian artist Christian Corbet is part of the collection of the University of Western Ontario.

She is one of the authors mentioned in the Moxy Früvous song "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors". The line "Who brought the cat? Would Margaret Atwood?" is a reference to her 1988 novel, Cat's Eye.

She is mentioned along with Virginia Woolf in the Regina Spektor song 'Paris'.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Carrington de Papp, I. Margaret Atwood and Her Works. Toronto: EWC, 1985.
Cooke, N. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW, 1998.
Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Howells, Coral Ann. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-54851-9
Rigney, B. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1987.
Rosenburg H. J. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingoCanada, 1998. ISBN 0-00-255423-2