Biography

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. She is the daughter of a forest entomologist, and spent part of her early years in the bush of North Quebec. She moved, at the age of seven, to Toronto. She studied at the University of Toronto, then took her masters degree at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, in 1962.

She is Canada's most eminent novelist and poet, and also writes short stories, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts and books for children, her works having been translated into over 30 languages. Her reviews and critical articles have appeared in various eminent magazines and she has also edited many books, including The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1983) and, with Robert Weaver, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986). She has been a full-time writer since 1972, first teaching English, then holding a variety of academic posts and writer residencies. She was President of the Writers Union of Canada from 1981-1982 and President of PEN, Canada from 1984-1986.

She is perhaps best known for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. Her first novel was The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten. This was followed by: Surfacing (1973), which deals with a woman's investigation into her father's disappearance; Lady Oracle (1977); Life Before Man (1980); Bodily Harm (1982), the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist recuperating on a Caribbean island; and The Handmaid's Tale (1986), a futuristic novel describing a woman's struggle to break free from her role. Her latest novels have been: Cat's Eye (1989), dealing with the subject of bullying among young girls; The Robber Bride (1993); Alias Grace (1996), the tale of a woman who is convicted for her involvement in two murders about which she claims to have no memory; The Blind Assassin (2000), a multi-layered family memoir; and Oryx and Crake (2003), a vision of a scientific dystopia, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.

These novels have received many awards. Alias Grace, The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Blind Assassin was successful in winning this prize in 2000.

Critical Perspective

It is hard to believe it now, but there was a time, and it was not that long ago, when Canadian literature was something of a joke, particularly in the USA, where mocking the Northern neighbours is a national pastime. Few books were published, and fewer still were taken seriously by the English-speaking literary community. Then Margaret Atwood arrived. Her first novel The Edible Woman (1969), which many saw as a critique of women's role within society, was notable for its use of irony and metaphor. Her passionate and irreverent book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) in which she called for her compatriots to value their own experience as Canadians, did much to boost a neglected country. Forty years on and things are very different. In the last decade, Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel (and Margaret Atwood herself) have all won the Booker Prize for Fiction. The late Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Stone Diaries and writers such as Rohinton Mistry, Douglas Coupland and Alice Munro have won an international following. However, there is no doubting that Atwood is the true diamond.

Margaret Atwood is the kind of writer for whom hyperbole seems an understatement. An icon in Canada, astonishingly prolific and famously abrasive in interview, she mixes high intelligence with a natural dry wit that leaves many a journalist foundering. Atwood has proved herself to be a writer whose acuity, lyricism and versatility are almost unmatched. She writes with wit and intellectual flair and seems able to turn her hand to anything from bildungsroman in Cat's Eye (1989), to Orwellian dystopia in The Handmaid's Tale (1986). Unlike those authors who peter out after a burst of early brilliance, Atwood's creative power shows no sign of diminishing.

[Notes on Oryx and Crake:]

Atwood's latest novel, Oryx and Crake, (2003), short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, is a cautionary tale set in a future in which genetic science, climate change and social inequality have laid waste to civilisation. Featuring a male protagonist for the very first time, the novel is once more a puzzle in which the reader spends a great deal of time unsure of what is happening. In that sense, it is vintage Atwood. Although Oryx and Crake has been described as a work of science fiction, Atwood herself prefers to see it as 'speculative fiction' - her definition of the latter being that it doesn't feature any space ships.

From http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03C18N390512635243