Margaret Atwood
(born November 18, 1939,
Ottawa
,
Ontario
, Canada) is a Canadian writer best known for her
prose
fiction and for her feminist perspective.
As an adolescent, Atwood divided her time between
Toronto
, her family’s primary residence, and the sparsely settled bush country in northern
Canada
, where her father, an
entomologist
, conducted research. She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. After completing her university studies at Victoria College at the
University of Toronto
, Atwood earned a
master’s degree
in
English literature
from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Dust jacket for the first American edition of
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood, illustration by Fred Marcellino, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986.
In her early
poetry
collections,
Double Persephone
(1961),
The Circle Game
(1964, revised in 1966), and
The Animals in That Country
(1968), Atwood ponders
human behaviour
, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them.
The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985;
film 1990
; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in
sexual slavery
in a repressive Christian
theocracy
of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series based on the
novel
premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood. The
Booker Prize
-winning
The Blind Assassin
(2000) is an intricately constructed narrative centring on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman ostensibly writing in order to dispel confusion about both her sister’s suicide and her own role in the posthumous publication of a novel supposedly written by her sister.
Other novels by Atwood include the
surreal
The Edible Woman
(1969);
Surfacing
(1972; film 1981), an exploration of the relationship between nature and
culture
that centres on a woman’s return to her childhood home in the northern wilderness of
Quebec
;
Lady Oracle
(1976);
Cat’s Eye
(1988);
The Robber Bride
(1993; television film 2007); and
Alias Grace
(1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial; a TV miniseries based on the latter work aired in 2017, written by Atwood and
Sarah Polley
. Atwood’s 2005 novel,
The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
, was inspired by
Homer
’s
Odyssey
.
In
Oryx and Crake
(2003), Atwood describes a plague-induced
apocalypse
in the near future through the observations and flashbacks of a protagonist who is possibly the event’s sole survivor. Minor characters from that book retell the dystopian tale from their perspectives in
The Year of the Flood
(2009).
MaddAddam
(2013), which continues to pluck at the biblical, eschatological, and anticorporate threads running through the previous novels, brings the satirical trilogy to a
denouement
. The novel
The Heart Goes Last
(2015), originally published as a serial
e-book
(2012?13), imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a
community
that functions like a prison.
Hag-Seed
(2016), a retelling of
William Shakespeare
’s
The Tempest
, was written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. In 2019
The Testaments
, a sequel to
The Handmaid’s Tale
, was published to critical acclaim and was a cowinner (with
Bernardine Evaristo’s
Girl, Woman, Other
) of the Booker Prize.
Atwood also writes short stories, collected in such volumes as
Dancing Girls
(1977),
Bluebeard’s Egg
(1983),
Wilderness Tips
(1991),
Moral Disorder
(2006),
Stone Mattress
(2014), and
Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
(2023). In addition, she continues to write poetry. Her 16th collection,
Dearly
, was published in 2020. Atwood’s nonfiction includes
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(2002), which grew out of a series of lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge;
Payback
(2008; film 2012), an impassioned
essay
that treats
debt
?both personal and governmental?as a cultural issue rather than as a political or an economic one;
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
(2011), in which she
illuminates
her relationship to
science fiction
; and
Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021
(2022), a collection of
diverse
writings as well as several speeches. Atwood also penned the
libretto
for the
opera
Pauline
, about
Pauline Johnson
, a Canadian poet-performer of Mohawk and English heritage; it premiered at the York Theatre in
Vancouver
in 2014.
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In addition to writing, Atwood teaches English literature at several Canadian and American universities. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2016 for the spirit of political activism threading her life and works.