Margaret Atwood is famous across the world for her poetry, novels, story writing, essays, and environmental activism. Atwood was born in Ottawa and earned her BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto. She then went on to do her MA from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She first came to public attention as a poet in the 1960s with her collections Double Persephone (1961), which was the winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal, and The Circle Game (1964), which was a winner of a Governor General’s award. Double Persephone dramatizes the contrasts between life and art, as well as natural and human creations. The Circle Game takes this opposition further, setting such human constructs as games, literature, and love against the instability of nature.
Although Atwood has gained critical popularity, she also has gained popularity with her readers; her books are regularly bestsellers and her novels have been adapted into popular movies and television series.
Atwood’s interest in female experience emerges clearly in her novels, particularly in: The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Life before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Even later novels such as The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996) feature female characters defined by their intelligence and complexity. By far Atwood’s most famous early novel, The Handmaid’s Tale also presages her later trilogy of scientific dystopia and environmental disaster Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). Rather than “science fiction,” Atwood uses the term “speculative fiction” to describe her project in these novels. The Handmaid’s Tale is dominated by an unforgiving view of patriarchy and its legacies.
Although she has been labeled a Canadian nationalist, a feminist, a gothic and science fiction writer, given the range and volume of her work, Atwood goes above and beyond all these labels and sets a new standard that will forever be her legacy.
Find out more information by going to her website.
