Who is Margaret Atwood?
Margaret Atwood didn’t attend school full-time till she was 12 but started writing at 6.
A decade later, when she turned 16, Atwood realized she wanted to be a professional writer.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer - well associating only the word ‘writer’ with her will be highly unfair because she is a fantastic poet who has published 18 books of poetry, a brilliant novelist with 18 novels tagged to her name, an essayist, a literary critic, an activist too and a more importantly a professor.
Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada - the second of the three children of an entomologist father and a dietician mother.
Because of her father’s work, Atwood spent much of her childhood shuttling back and forth between the woods where her father worked, Ottawa, and Toronto.
Atwood graduated high school in 1957 and then obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1961. In 1962, Margaret Atwood post-graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Radcliff College of Harvard University.
Atwood began her career as a writer by publishing poetry collections. Her first poetry book was Double Persephone which was published as a pamphlet in 1961.
A few years later she published her second poetry collection The Circle Game which won the Governor’s General award.
After publishing a few more poetry collections in the 60s, Atwood published her first novel The Edible Woman in 1969 which had a completely different theme of a woman distancing herself from food as a means of showing rebellion against the male dominion.
The 70s was the decade when Atwood rose to fame as a writer. Margaret Atwood published her first short story collection Dancing Girls in 1977. In addition, she also released 3 novels between 1972 and 1979 - Surfacing,Lady Oracle & Life Before Man.
But Atwood didn’t restrict herself to only novels and short story collections - she also published six story collections during the decade between 1970 and 1978.
She started getting so popular in the mid-70s that Maclean’s, a prominent Canadian magazine termed her ‘Canada’s most gossiped writer’.
A decade later in the 80s, awards started coming to the writer Margaret Atwood.
Her novel The Handmade’s Tale won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Governor General’s Award.
1988 released novel Cat’s Eye made it as a finalist for the 1988 Governor General’s Award as well as the 1989 Booker Prize.
Atwood’s fame continued to grow with her 1993 novel The Robber Bride and 1996 novel Alias Grace both of which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award.
Alias Grace even made it as the finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize and won the Giller Prize in 1996. Both novels had females as the villain characters.
The Booker Prize finally came to Atwood in the year 2000 when her critically acclaimed novel The Blind Assassin won it along with the Hammett Prize in the same year.
Atwood in 2003 released the novel titled Oryx and Crake which was the first book of the novel series that went to be known as the MaddAddam Trilogy.
The MaddAddam Trilogy had a dystopian society created by genetic modification and man-made plague as its theme in which the humans that are left need to fight to live.
Atwood married American writer Jim Polk in 1968 but the couple divorced in 1973. Margaret Atwood then met novelist Graeme Gibson with whom she moved to a farm in Ontario.
The couple’s daughter, Eleanor Gibson was born in 1978.
Atwood and Gibson were together until Gibson died of dementia in 2019.
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How many books has Margaret Atwood written?
Margaret Atwood has written 18 poetry collections, 17 novels,11 non-fiction books, 9 short fiction books, 8 children’s books, 3 picture books, and various small press editions involving poetry, fiction, television scripts, Radio scripts, recordings and theatre.
What is Margaret Atwood’s most famous work?
The novel The Handmaid’s Tale released in 1985 is the most popular work of Margaret Atwood.
Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel whose central theme is the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.
The Republic of Gilead is a patriarchal, totalitarian state that is set in future New England. It has already overthrown the US government.
In this state, women are forced to reproduce for the ruling class of the state known as ‘The Commanders’. The novel explores the theme of suppressed women in a patriarchal society, loss of their individuality, forced reproduction, and also their fight to gain their rights and individuality.
The Handmaid’s Tale won the Governor’s General Award in 1985 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.
This novel was also nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize, 1986 Nebula Award and 1987 Prometheus Award.
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