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Margaret Atwood CC (born November 18, 1939) Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers. She has established herself as a prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, proto-feminist and political activist. She has been hailed as one of Canada’s most eminent writers and has received honorary recognition, throughout her career, both nationally and internationally. Atwood, through her profuse writings, critiques and activism, has ultimately contributed to the growth of women’s writing and to the established legitimacy of Canadian literature.

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Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa Ontario on November 18, 1939. She was the second of three children born to Carl Edmund Atwood, a professor of zoology, and Margaret Dorothy Killiam, a former dietician and nutritionist (Cooke 21). Due to her father’s ongoing research, Atwood spent a significant amount of her childhood “[growing] up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto” and “did not attend a full year of school…until grade eight” (Carrington 1). Such a life, allowed Atwood to become a voracious reader who enjoyed refined literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm’s fairy tales, Canadian animal stories and comic books (Cooke 24-25).

At the age of sixteen Atwood began to write avidly and by 1957, she had begun diligently to hone her skills as a writer at Victoria College at the University of Toronto (Cooke 54). During her university career at Victoria College, professors Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye undoubtedly influenced Atwood by stimulating her both intellectually and artistically (Carrington 1). As a result, she graduated with “an honours English degree with a minor concentration in philosophy and French, focusing on ethics and aesthetics” (Cooke 54). In the fall of 1961, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and the E.J. Pratt Medal for her first published book of poems , she began graduate studies at Radcliffe College, Harvard. (Carrington 2). She obtained an M.A. from Harvard and “began a ten year period during which she held several academic and nonacademic positions, published fiction and poetry, and began postgraduate work” (Carrington 2). In 1982 Atwood produced , a gathering together of Atwood writings and other feminist writings from a twenty-two-year period, and presented it to her Harvard supervisor Jerome Buckley. After seventeen years, numerous publications, and an array of honorary mentions, Atwood had finally “fulfilled the requirements of a doctoral dissertation” (Cooke 264-265).

In 1968, Atwood was married to Jim Polk whom she later divorced in 1973. Following her divorce, she married novelist, Graeme Gibson who was the father of two teenage boys, Matt and Grae. In September of 1973, Atwood and Gibson moved north of Toronto to Alliston Ontario, and in 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. After living in various places in North America and around the world, she returned to Toronto in 1980, and she continues to reside there with Gibson and their daughter.

Reviewers of Margaret Atwood’s work have attempted to categorize her as “a feminist writer, for her incisive commentaries on sex roles; a religious writer, for her visions of spiritual ecstasy; a gothic writer, for her images of grotesque, misfits, and surreal disorientations of the psyche; a writer of the Canadian wilderness; a nationalist writer [and] a regionalist” (Rosenberg 15). She has definitely covered a lot of ground since the publication of her first book of poetry (1972). This particular publication “helped to fuel an explosion of interest in Canadian Literature and culture during the 1970s” (Cooke 196). That same year Atwood also published a novel, (1977), which won her the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction. In 1978 she published (1979).

She continued to produce a slew of publications in the 1980s including: another children’s book, (1989), became vice-chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and continued to fight literary censorship as the president of PEN, an international pressure group committed to freeing writers who are political prisoners, from 1984 to 1986.

Atwood’s writing continued in the 1990s with the publication of: (2006).

While fostering her literary career, Atwood also held numerous academic positions. Starting in the 1960s, Atwood taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), and at York University in Toronto (1971-72). Atwood has been presented with sixteen honorary degrees and an honorary doctorate from Victoria College in 1987. She has also been honoured with several awards since the mid-1960s, and was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2001.

Margaret Atwood’s career and influence has been truly extraordinary. As a writer she has achieved acclaimed success because she has developed an individual, “Atwoodian,” voice that has consistently tested the limits of theory and ideological limitations. In Atwood’s fiction “there is no essentialist definitions of ‘woman’ of ‘feminism’ of even ‘Canadian,’ but instead representations of the endless complexity and quirkiness of human behaviour which exceeds ideological labels and the explanatory power of theory” (Howells 19). She transcends traditional genre, gender and national labels and she continuously “supris[es] her readers with ongoing experimentalism and radical challenges to contemporary social myths and fashionable ideologies” (Howells 161).

Throughout her career, Atwood has focused on Canadian national identity, Canada’s relations with the United States and Europe, human rights issues, environmental issues, the Canadian wilderness, the social myths of femininity, representations women’s bodies in art, women’s social and economic exploitation, as well as women’s relations with each other and with men (Howells 163). With her work published in fifteen countries, she has achieved an international reputation because she has “question[ed] stereotypes of nationality and gender, exposing cultural fictions and the artificial limits they impose on our understanding of ourselves and other human beings” (Howells 2). Overall, she has proven to put Canada and female writers on the literary world map, and she continues to intrigue modern readers; because, “Atwood does have something terribly important [and insightful] to tell us, something we do, in fact, need to know (Rigney 135). As a prolific, controversial, and innovative writer, Atwood has truly furthered Canada as a nation, postmodernist thinking, feminist achievements, and has undoubtedly assisted in supporting the development of an imaginative literary future.