Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood the Canadian poet, novelist and critic (born 1939) whose fiction, ranging from the dystopian The Handmaid's Tale to the historical Alias Grace and the MaddAddam trilogy, has made her one of the most influential and versatile writers in English.

Early Life and Education

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, the daughter of Carl Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killam, a homemaker. Because of her father's research she spent much of her childhood in the forests of northern Quebec and Ontario, where the family lived in remote field camps, and she did not attend school full-time until she was eleven.

The wilderness of her early years, and the experience of living at the edge of settled society, gave her a lasting sense of nature as both a resource and a danger, a theme that runs through her writing. She read widely and began writing seriously as a teenager, and she has said that she decided to become a writer at the age of sixteen.

She studied at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1961, and then took a master's degree at Radcliffe College, after which she did further graduate work at Harvard. She taught at several universities and worked at various jobs before establishing herself as a full-time writer. Her academic training in literature informed both her poetry and her critical prose.

Poetry and Early Fiction

Atwood began as a poet and published her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961, followed by The Circle Game in 1964, which won the Governor General's Award. Her poetry is marked by precision, irony and a fascination with myth, and it ranges from the personal to the political. She has continued to publish poetry throughout her career.

Her first novel, The Edible Woman, appeared in 1969 and tells the story of a young woman whose engagement to a conventional man triggers a disorder in which she finds herself unable to eat. The book, written before the women's movement of the 1970s had fully taken shape, anticipates many of its themes in its satire of consumer society and marriage.

This was followed by Surfacing, a powerfully spare novel of a woman's return to the wilderness of northern Quebec in search of her missing father, and by Lady Oracle and Life Before Man. These novels established her characteristic concerns: the position of women, the uses and abuses of power, the relations between Canada and the United States, and the difficulties of identity and self-knowledge.

The Handmaid's Tale and Dystopia

The Handmaid's Tale, published in 1985, is her best-known work. It imagines a future United States transformed into the theocratic republic of Gilead, where women are stripped of their rights and assigned roles according to a rigid hierarchy. The narrator, Offred, is a handmaid whose function is to bear children for a childless commander and his wife, and the novel records her memories, her survival and her resistance.

The book is at once a dystopia, a study of power and gender, and a reflection on the political currents of the 1980s, including the rise of religious fundamentalism and the backlash against feminism. Its use of a first-person narrator recovering her own story, and its appended section of scholarly commentary, give it a complex and unsettling structure. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and has been adapted into a film, an opera and a celebrated television series.

Atwood has written other speculative fiction, notably the MaddAddam trilogy of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, which imagines a world devastated by a manmade plague brought on by corporate greed and bioengineering. These works extend her meditation on ecological collapse, technology and what it means to be human, and they have been read as warnings about the direction of modern society.

Historical Fiction and the Range of Her Work

Alongside her speculative fiction Atwood has written historical novels. Alias Grace, published in 1996, reconstructs the case of Grace Marks, a Canadian servant convicted of murder in the nineteenth century, and examines the ambiguous evidence about her guilt. The novel, which won the Giller Prize, blends documentary material with invented testimony and explores the ways in which women's stories have been told by others.

The Blind Assassin, published in 2000 and winner of the Booker Prize, is a complex tale constructed from a novel within a novel, family letters and newspaper reports, and it tells the story of two sisters whose lives span much of the twentieth century. It shows her mastery of narrative form as well as her interest in how stories are made and misused, and it is often considered one of her finest achievements.

Her other works include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, The Penelopiad, a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, and the Hag-Seed novella, as well as many volumes of short stories and essays. Her range across genres is remarkable, and she has continued to publish into her eighties.

Ideas, Influence and Legacy

Atwood writes about power and its abuses, about the relations between men and women, and about the human place in the natural world. She is a sharp observer of political and cultural trends, and her fiction often takes the anxieties of the present and projects them into a plausible future. She has insisted that nothing in her dystopias is invented without precedent, and her work has been widely used to think about rights, freedom and environmental crisis.

She is also a distinguished critic and essayist. In books such as Survival and Negotiating with the Dead she has reflected on Canadian literature and on the craft of writing, and her public commentary on censorship, censorship of her own books, and the pressures on writers has made her an important voice in cultural debate. Her writing is known for its wit, its clarity and its verbal precision.

She has won many awards, including the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and she has been shortlisted for the Booker several times. She remains a central figure in Canadian letters and in world literature, and her work continues to reach new generations of readers. She is remembered as a writer of extraordinary range whose imaginative courage has enlarged the possibilities of fiction.

See also

• The Handmaid's Tale
• Canadian literature
• Dystopian fiction
• The Blind Assassin