Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood (1939- ), Canadian poet and novelist, born in Ottawa and educated at the University of Toronto, Radcliffe College, and Harvard University. Drawn to writing from an early age, Atwood began to publish her poems when she was 19 and brought out her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, in 1961. She continued writing while teaching English literature at various universities in Canada (1964-1972) and as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto (1972-1973). She won international acclaim with the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), which was followed by many others, including Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), Cat's Eye (1988), and The Robber Bride (1993). Responding to critics' classification of some of her works as “feminist”, Atwood pointed out that she had begun dealing with themes such as growing up female in the 1950s and gender-role changes before they were popularized by the women's liberation movement.

Critical response was favourable to Atwood's books of poetry, particularly Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974). The Circle Game (1966) won the Canadian Governor-General's Award for poetry, as did The Handmaid's Tale (1985) for fiction. A film based on The Handmaid's Tale was released in 1990. A collection of short stories, Wilderness Tips, was published in 1991. The body of her work was awarded the Welsh Arts Council's International Writer's Prize (1982). The highly acclaimed Alias Grace, a fictional reconstruction of a notorious 19th-century Canadian murder case, was published in 1996. In 2000, Atwood won the Booker Prize for her novel The Blind Assassin, which tells the story of an old lady who looks back at her life and the events surrounding her sister’s early death. Her later works are the dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003); The Penelopiad (2005), a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’s wife Penelope; and the short prose collection The Tent (2006).