Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a writer born on the 18th of November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is the second child of a forest-entomologist father, and a former-dietician mother.

Atwood showed a passion for writing at an early age and she was sixteen years old when she began to study at the University of Toronto. She then took her Master’s degree in English literature at Cambridge. She is an internationally-known novelist and poet. She is especially known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective. Her texts have been translated into many different languages and adapted into different films.

In addition to writing, Atwood has held positions as an English lecturer or writer-in-residence at various universities. She was also the President of the Writers’ Union of Canada in the 1980’s.

Atwood now lives in Toronto with her second husband, Graeme Gibson, and their daughter.

Her most famous works and awards

Margaret Atwood is best known for her novels, but she has also written short-stories, poetry, critical studies and even children’s books. Some of her most famous short-stories include “Dancing Girls,” published in 1977, “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983) and the collection of short-stories Stone Mattress from 2014.

She has won more than fifty-five literary prizes, including two Governor Generals’ Awards. She won the first one for the poetry collection The Circle Game, and the second for the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was published in 1985 and tells the story of a woman struggling to break free from her obligation to bear children. This futuristic novel was performed as an opera, and was also adapted as a very successful TV series in 2017. Other award-winning novels by Atwood include Alias Grace, published in 1996, which tells the story of a woman convicted for her involvement in two murders, and The Blind Assassin (2000), which centres on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman.

Her literary style

Quality and quantity are two words that describe well Atwood’s work. She often uses ‘role reversal’ and ‘new beginnings’ as themes in her novels, most of them based on women managing their relationship to the world and every person around them. Consequently, she especially considers human behaviour and nature. Science is also an important theme in her works, certainly due to her father’s occupation. She represents her feelings in her poems with an everyday speech, and a few rhymes. The novels, by contrast, show more social-realist situations.

The typical character of her stories is a modern woman who is writer or artist with social-professional commitment.  She is considered as a feminist writer because of her many texts about ‘issues of concern to feminists from the 70s up to today’.

Atwood is a very generous and committed author. For instance, she gave her $47,000 Booker Prize award (the highest literary award in Great Britain) to environmental and literary causes.

To conclude, the woman who is considered as one of the best Canadian writers is bound to continue to represent an essential character in international literature for a long time to come. 

Ina Lentzen, Chloé Rutten, Léa Varet 

SOURCES

- GradeSaver, “Margaret Atwood Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays.”, Atwood Margaret,  www.gradesaver.com/author/margaret-atwood.

- Biography.com Editors, “Margaret Atwood.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 27 Feb. 2018, www.biography.com/people/margaret-atwood-9191928.

- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Margaret Atwood.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Atwood.

- British Council. “Margaret Atwood.” Literature, 1 Jan. 1970, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/margaret-atwood.

- Encyclopedia of World Biography. “Margaret Atwood Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, www.notablebiographies.com/An-Ba/Atwood-Margaret.html.

-  Margaret Atwood, Biography.” Margaret Atwood, margaretatwood.ca/biography/