Margaret Atwood

Canadian novelist and literary critic

• Born: November 18, 1939
• Place of Birth: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Atwood has become one of the most prominent Canadian writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her novels, beginning with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), have become international best sellers, and her work as a writer of poetry, fiction, and critical essays is highly regarded by academics. In addition, she has become a strong voice for women, the environment, and for human rights in general.

Early Life

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, to Carl Edmund Atwood, a zoology professor, and Margaret Dorothy Killam, a dietician and nutritionist. She had a sister, Ruth, who was twelve years younger, and a brother, Harold, who was two years older; he was, for Margaret, the more important sibling. As young children, she and Harold spent half of each year in the woods of northern Ontario and Québec, helping their father collect insects, whose damage to Canadian forests he reported to the government. The remote, primitive living quarters in tents and later a rustic cabin, without electricity, running water, or other amenities, had a profoundly formative effect on Atwood's life, especially in developing a strong voice as an environmentalist. Much of the year Atwood and her brother were homeschooled by their mother, and because the forest camp had no playmates for them, the two children became best friends. They read and played children’s games together, regardless of gender differences. Atwood had unconventional role models in a father who shared domestic chores and in a mother who adapted easily to the exigencies of living in the woods, replacing skirts with slacks and acting out her conviction that women could do what men did.

In her later childhood, after her father became a university professor and the family spent more of the year in “civilization,” Atwood had to adjust to “socialization.” The experience in “the bush,” however, had long-term benefits. Until adolescence, Atwood and her brother continued to be best friends and playmates. As she herself has claimed, both were talented in science and literature, and it might have been she who became the scientist and her brother the literature professor or writer. When, at age sixteen, she informed her parents that she wanted to become a writer, they hesitated, not so much because writers generally were men, but because few writers could support themselves on writing alone. Atwood developed a feminist sensibility, not by reading one of the early writers of the twentieth-century women’s movement, such as Simone de Beauvoir, but by measuring the constraints on women’s aspirations in her society against the model of a mother who was comfortable as a woman doing things outside and beyond what was socially acceptable for a woman to do.

In 1967, she married James Polk, an American, whom she had met at Harvard. They would divorce in 1973 and Atwood would then form a decades-long relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019. The couple had one daughter, Eleanor, born in 1976.

Life’s Work

Although Atwood began to write by the time she was sixteen years old, she became serious about writing while a student at the University of Toronto in the late 1950s. In 1961 she published her first book, Double Persephone, for which she received the E. J. Pratt Medal for Poetry. That year she also received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and began graduate work at Radcliffe College, where she completed an MA in 1962 and continued to work toward a PhD in literature. From 1963 to 1965 she was on leave from Harvard (with which Radcliffe had merged), working in market research in Toronto, teaching at the University of British Columbia, and drafting her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). In 1966 she published her next book, The Circle Game, which received the 1967 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 1967 her book The Animals in That Country won first prize in the Centennial Commission Poetry Competition. Over the next years she continued to teach, first at Sir George Williams University in Montreal and then at the University of Alberta. The Edible Woman and two more poetry collections, The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Procedures for Underground, published by Oxford University Press in 1970, signaled the clear beginning for Atwood of a successful career as a writer.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s Atwood continued to establish herself as a leading Canadian writer, and her success in publishing her writing made it possible for her to discontinue teaching and working for pay altogether. In 1976 another index of her success as a poet was the publication of her Selected Poems by Oxford and Simon & Schuster. In 1978, Two-Headed Poems, and in 1984, Interlunar, appeared, along with collections of shorter fiction, Dancing Girls in 1977, True Stories in 1981, and Bluebeard’s Egg in 1983, but her reputation was most substantially grounded in her novels Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), and Bodily Harm (1981).

Atwood’s dystopian and feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) proved to be a quantum leap in her career. In addition to winning the Governor General’s Award in 1986, the book, about, among other topics, Christian fundamentalism, fascism, women’s subjugation, and women’s empowerment under a totalitarian state, was the first novel through which much of her later audience came to know her work. In 1990, The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter; in 2000 the novel was adapted for opera; and in 2017 the streaming service Hulu began a series adaptation of the novel. (Ironically, although The Handmaid's Tale is famous as a work of feminist science fiction, Atwood has rejected both labels.) When her next novel, Cat’s Eye, appeared in 1989, its success was significantly enhanced by the large readership Atwood had first gained through the critical and popular success of The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps because the judges regretted having overlooked The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye was short-listed for the Booker Prize, awarded annually to the best novel published in the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth, which includes Canada. The Booker Prize (called the Man Booker Prize from 2002, when the Man Group, an investments firm, began to sponsor the award, until 2019) stands as a monument to Atwood’s burgeoning reputation.

The Robber Bride (1993), the novel that followed Cat’s Eye, was not short-listed for the prize, but what was listed was Atwood’s next novel, Alias Grace (1996). After she received the prize for The Blind Assassin (2000), some in the Margaret Atwood Society began to anticipate that one October she might receive a telephone call from Stockholm informing her she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although that honor did not arrive, Atwood received many prizes too numerous to list, as well as dozens of honorary degrees, notably from Oxford (1998), Cambridge (2001), Harvard (2004), and the Sorbonne (2005). Oryx and Crake (2003), paired by Atwood with The Handmaid’s Tale as speculative fiction, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

In the late 1990s and mid-2000s, she additionally published collections of her poetry, such as Morning in the Burned House (1995), and books of short fiction, such as Wilderness Tips (1991) and Moral Disorder (2006), along with books for children, such as Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003) and Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004). In 2005 she published the novel The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. She also published several collections of her essays, ranging from the quirky Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) and The Tent (2006) to Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), based on the Clarendon lectures she gave at Oxford in 1991. Through her public performances in interviews, readings from her work, academic lectures, and talks, Atwood became a leading spokesperson for Canadian culture.

The early 2010s saw the release of several Atwood titles, including a children's book, Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery (2011); a nonfiction title, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011); as well as The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), which, along with Oryx and Crake, comprise her MaddAddam trilogy. The Year of the Flood made the 2011 longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A collection of short stories, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, was released in 2014; that year she also wrote a novel, Scribbler Moon, to be released in 2114 as part of the Future Library Project, a sort of literary time capsule. Starting in 2012, Atwood also began to release Positron, a serialized e-book, including the installments I'm Starved for You (2012); Choke Collar: Positron, Episode Two (2012); Erase Me: Positron, Episode Three (2013); and The Heart Goes Last, Episode Four (2013). In 2015 she published The Heart Goes Last, combining the four episodes and expanding them into a full novel. In 2019, her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, titled The Testaments, won the Booker Prize.

In the 2020s, Atwood continued to write and publish in a variety of mediums. After releasing a new volume of poetry, Dearly, in 2020, she put out her first collection of short stories in almost a decade, titled Old Babes in the Wood, in 2023. Meanwhile, 2022 had seen the publication of her nonfiction collection Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021. In addition to articles written by Atwood on newsworthy events and social issues appearing in publications such as the Guardian, this period brought the world premiere of a three-act ballet production inspired by her MaddAddam trilogy as well as the publication of her stand-alone short story "Cut & Thirst" (2024).

Atwood is also the founder of the company Syngrafii, originally Unotchit, which created the LongPen technology, allowing writers to hold book signings without being physically present.

Significance

When Atwood graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1961 from Victoria College, University of Toronto, there was very little Canadian literature. She has joked that she knew virtually all the aspiring young poets in Canada because they could easily fit into a small room. When she began writing, many Canadians who aspired to become writers assumed that the “great, good place” to write was Paris or New York rather than Canada. Few Canadian presses even published Canadian writing. Atwood and her American husband Polk became deeply involved in a new Canadian press, House of Anansi, established by their friend Dennis Lee.

In the 1970s, Atwood was a leader in the movement to establish a Canadian culture, distinct from the culture of the United States. Through her novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and children’s books, Atwood has become one of the best-known and most highly regarded Canadian writers, one who inspired a movement to develop a truly Canadian literature.

Bibliography

Allardice, Lisa. "'I Can Say Things Other People Are Afraid to': Margaret Atwood on Censorship, Literary Feuds, and Trump." The Guardian, 4 May 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/04/i-can-say-things-other-people-are-afraid-to-margaret-atwood-on-censorship-literary-feuds-and-trump. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Atwood, Margaret. "An Interview with Margaret Atwood." Interview by Ed Finn. Slate, 6 Feb. 2015, slate.com/technology/2015/02/margaret-atwood-interview-the-author-speaks-on-hope-science-and-the-future.html. Accessed 15 Sept. 2015.

Atwood, Margaret. "Margaret Atwood: 'Being a Famous Writer Is Different to Being a Rock Star. People Bond to the Books. Nobody Wants My Shoelaces.'" Interview by Candice Pires. The Guardian, 12 Sept. 2015, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/12/margaret-atwood-this-much-i-know. Accessed 15 Sept. 2015.

Atwood, Margaret. "Margaret Atwood Is Ready to Let It Rip." Interview by Kate Knibbs. Wired, 7 Mar. 2023, www.wired.com/story/margaret-atwood-interview/. Accessed 11 Apr. 2023.

Bouson, J. Brooks, editor. Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Salem, 2013.

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. ECW, 1998.

Flood, Alison. "Into the Woods: Margaret Atwood Reveals her Future Library Book, Scribbler Moon." The Guardian, 27 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/27/margaret-atwood-scribbler-moon-future-library-norway-katie-paterson. Accessed 15 Sept. 2015.

Howells, Coral Ann, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Ingersoll, Earl G., editor. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Ontario Review P, 1990.

Ingersoll, Earl G., editor. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Ontario Review P, 2006.

Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent. Ashgate, 2012.

Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. HarperFlamingo, 1998.