Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa in 1939, is a Canadian novelist, poet and literary critic whose career began in the early 1960s and has now lasted more than half a century. She is best known for her dystopian fiction, but her output also includes essays, short stories, children's books, graphic novels and scripts for television.

She was the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killam, a former dietitian from Nova Scotia. Her father's research in forest insects meant that much of her childhood was spent travelling between northern Quebec, Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto, and she did not attend school full time until she was twelve. She was a voracious reader, moving from Grimms' fairy tales to mystery paperbacks and comic books, and she began writing plays and poems at a young age. At Victoria College in Toronto her teachers included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye, whose interest in myth and archetype shaped her early poetry. She graduated in 1961 and took a master's degree at Radcliffe College, Harvard, in 1962, though she never finished her doctoral dissertation.

Her first collection of poems, Double Persephone, won the E. J. Pratt Medal, and The Circle Game (1966) received the Governor General's Award. She taught at several Canadian universities, including British Columbia, Sir George Williams in Montreal, Alberta and York, and later held posts in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), satirised North American consumerism and already contained the feminist concerns that run through much of her work. The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), a sequence of poems written in the voice of a nineteenth-century settler, shows her lasting interest in Canada's colonial past.

In Survival (1972), a thematic guide to Canadian literature, she argued that survival was the central symbol of the country's writing, and the book helped draw wider attention to Canadian authors. Surfacing (1972) framed the conflict between nature and technology in political terms. The Handmaid's Tale (1985) imagined a theocratic regime that confines women to reproductive roles, and it became her best-known book. Her style mixes irony, precision and close attention to language and power. She often uses historiographic metafiction, as in Alias Grace (1996), which draws on the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, and The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the Booker Prize.

Oryx and Crake (2003) opened a trilogy completed by The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. Its speculative vision addresses genetic modification, corporate control and human-made disaster. Her honours include two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award. She co-founded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada, and she is a member of Amnesty International. Her legacy lies in bringing Canadian writing to readers around the world and in making speculative fiction a serious part of literary debate. Her books are now widely studied in schools and universities across many countries.