Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian author. Her works include The Circle Game (1966), Surfacing (1972), Selected Poems (1976), Dancing Girls (1977), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Cat's Eye (1988).^[1] She is known for her feminist views, which can be easily seen in some of her works.

Life and Works[edit]

Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Canada, to a nutritionist and an entomologist who engendered her love of nature as she traveled with them around Ontario.^[2] She was formally educated at Toronto, Radcliffe, and Harvard, and received honorary degrees from several Canadian universities as well as Oxford.^[3] She first became known as a poet with her publishing of Double Persephone (1961) and The Circle Game (1964).^[4] In the mid-sixties, she began to teach college English, worked at many universities as far from Toronto as San Antonio in 1989.^[5] She wrote several collections of poetry during that time, including Selected Poems, but is best known for her novels, such as The Edible Woman, about a woman who cannot eat, Surfacing, about a woman investigating her father's disappearance, and Cat's Eye, about bullying among young girls. After teaching, she returned to writing full-time and released one of her most popular novels, Year of the Flood (2009). She tries not to label herself a feminist, but many readers interpret feminist views from her works.^[6] Her novel The Handmaid's Tale is blatantly thus, describing a woman living in sexual slavery in, of all governments, a Christian theocracy that came to be in an ecological upheaval.^[7] More accurately, she calls her work "speculative fiction," when it is labeled as science fiction (especially in the case of her dystopian Oryx and Crake.) Her current series is called the Angel Catbird series, and is illustrated by Johnny Christmas (pseudonym of Johnny Caravella).^[8]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Official Website
• Poems at the Poem Hunter website