Margaret Atwood

18 November 1939 (Ottawa). Canadian prizewinning author. Her publications include over 50 books of various genres such as fiction and graphic novels as well as various poems and short stories.

Early life and education

Margaret Atwood was born as the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood and Margaret Killam Atwood. The family spent the first years of her childhood in Ottawa and moved to Toronto in 1946, after her father, an entomologist, took on a job at the University of Toronto. Later, Atwood moved to the USA and Europe and finally came back to Toronto in 1992, where she currently lives. Atwood studied at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she graduated with honors in English language and literature in 1961 and later earned her master's degree in English literature at Radcliffe College, Cambridge in 1962. There she met her first husband James Polk, whom she married in 1966. After finishing college, Atwood worked at several universities in Canada, the USA and Australia. In 1973, she and James Polk got divorced and Atwood moves in with Graeme Gibson. In 1976, she gave birth to their daughter Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson.

Career

Atwood started writing at the age of five years, she wrote for the literary magazine Clan Call while attending the Leaside High School in Toronto and continued working for magazines during her time at Victoria College. In 1961, Atwood published Double Persephone, a poetry collection which was awarded with the E.J. Pratt Award for Poetry. In 1966, she published the next collection, The Circle Games which was again awarded, just as many of her later works.

Her works show her great interest in political and feminist topics, as her prizewinning novel ''The Handmaid's Tale'', which later became a TV series, demonstrates. It shows forms of dictatorship, tyranny, torture and the reality of violence.

Works Cited

"Biography." Margaret Atwood, 2013-2022. https://margaretatwood.ca. Accessed December 7 2023.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. London, 1987
Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston, 1984.