Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Born:	November 18, 1939 (age 67) Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Occupation:	Novelist, Poet
Nationality:	Canadian
Genres:	Romance, Historical fiction, Speculative fiction, Dystopian fiction
Website:	http://www.owtoad.com/

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 national and international recognition for her writing.

Contents 1 Life 2 Work 3 Works 3.1 Novels 3.2 Poetry collections 3.3 Short fiction collections 3.4 Anthologies edited 3.5 Other short stories 3.6 Children's books 3.7 Non-fiction 3.8 Drawings 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 Quebec 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. She went to Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto.

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, for two 2-year periods, but never took a degree. 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.

Atwood is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection was Double Persephone (1961). The Circle Game (1964) won the Governor General's award for poetry. Of Atwood's poetry collections, the most well-known is perhaps The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), in which Atwood writes poems from the viewpoint of Susanna Moodie, a historical nineteenth-century Canadian pioneer on the frontier.

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] Works

[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'.

In the short-lived TV series True North, a cat is named Margaret Atwood.

She studied with Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto.

Atwood unintentionally inspired Jan Wong to create her notorious "Lunch with Jan Wong" column in the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail after an acrimonious interview she gave Wong in a restaurant. When Atwood saw the interview in print she demanded that the paper not only retract it, but delete all copies from office computers. (The reason may have been that Wong had suggested Atwood's daughter might be in danger from the author's fans.) The Globe and Mail responded by creating Wong's long-running column.

Atwood helped to launch the career of poet Carolyn Forche when United States publishers rejected Forche's poetry about the civil war in El Salvador.

Atwood donated all of her Booker Prize money to environmental causes.

Atwood gave up her house in France after Jacques Chirac resumed nuclear testing.

Though frequently identified with the left, Atwood has described herself as a Red Tory.

An active member of Amnesty International, Atwood once promised a free subscription to its bimonthly reports to the next person who accused her of being too pessimistic; it is unknown who, if anyone, has collected.

The public figures rumored to have appeared in mostly unflattering fictional guise throughout Atwood's work include Robert Fulford, Barbara Amiel, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Stephen Hawking, June Callwood, Erin Moure, Barbara Frum, and Atwood herself.

Atwood's poem "Journey to the Interior" is included in the Journeys Stimulus Booklet studied as part of the compulsory HSC English course undertaken by all students in the final year of secondary schooling in New South Wales, Australia.

[edit] See also

• Canadian literature
• Canadian poetry

[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

[edit] External links

• Margaret Atwood's home page
• Margaret Atwood at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Margaret Atwood at www.contemporarywriters.com
• Margaret Atwood at the Internet Book List
• Margaret Atwood Speaker Profile at The Lavin Agency
• The Margaret Atwood Society home page
• Luminarium Margaret Atwood Research guides to novels and short stories
• Profile from The Guardian
• January 1997 Interview with Salon.com
• Unotchit Inc. official website
• Poems by Margaret Atwood at PoetryFoundation.org
• Commentary on Unotchit from Neil Gaiman
• Commentary on Unotchit from Neal Pollack
• 1986 Audio Interview with Margaret Atwood - RealAudio (30 min 14 s)
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Order of Canada Citation
• Margaret Atwood's LongPen invention Atwood invents a device that allows her to sign books from anywhere in the world.
• Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Atwood is a founding trustee.
• CBC Digital Archives - Margaret Atwood: Queen of CanLit
• Reading report: Margaret Atwood at Barnes & Noble from BookishLove.net (November 2006)
• Lesson plans for The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye at Web English Teacher