Margaret Atwood biography, born, earlylife, books,
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, trainer, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has posted 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, eleven books of non-fiction, 9 collections of quick fiction, eight kid's books, and photo novels, and a number of small press variants of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has received numerous awards and honors for her writing, together with two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A quantity of her works were adapted for film and tv.Atwood's works encompass a ramification of topics along with gender and identity, religion and fable, the energy of language, weather change, and "energy politics". Many of her poems are stimulated through myths and fairy tales which interested her from a completely early age.
Early life and Education
Atwood became born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of 3 children of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy , a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia. Because of her father's studies in wooded area entomology, Atwood spent an awful lot of her youth in the backwoods of northern Quebec, and visiting back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
She did no longer attend college complete-time till she changed into 12 years vintage. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian animal memories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.Atwood started writing performs and poems on the age of 6.
As a toddler, she also participated within the Brownie software of Girl Guides of Canada. Atwood has written approximately her studies in Girl Guides in numerous of her guides.
Atwood found out she wanted to write professionally while she turned into sixteen.In 1957, she began analyzing at Victoria College within the University of Toronto, in which she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the university literary magazine, and participated within the sophomore theatrical culture of The Bob Comedy Revue. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.
In 1961, Atwood started out graduate research at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She acquired a grasp's diploma (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued doctoral research for 2 years, however did no longer end her dissertation, The English Metaphysical Romance.
Personal Life-
Atwood has a sister, Ruth Atwood, born in 1951, and a brother who is two years older, Harold Leslie Atwood. She has claimed that, in keeping with her grandmother (maiden name Webster) the 17th-century witchcraft-lynching survivor Mary Webster could have been an ancestor: '"On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn’t ... So take your choose."' Webster is the difficulty of Atwood's poem "Half-Hanged Mary", as well as the challenge of Atwood's willpower in her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985).
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American author, in 1968, but divorced in 1973. She formed a dating with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, become born in 1976.
The circle of relatives returned to Toronto in 1980. Atwood and Gibson had been together until September 18, 2019, while Gibson died after laid low with dementia. She wrote approximately Gibson in the poem Dearly and in an accompanying essay on grief and poetry posted in The Guardian in 2020.Atwood said about Gibson "He wasn't an egotist, so he wasn't threatened by anything I become doing. He stated to our daughter toward the quit of his lifestyles, 'Your mum would nevertheless had been a author if she hadn't met me, but she wouldn't have had as a great deal a laugh'".
Although she is an accomplished creator, Atwood says that she is "a horrible speller" who writes both on a laptop and by using hand.
Career-
Nineteen Sixties
Atwood's first e book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published as a pamphlet by Hawkshead Press in 1961, triumphing the E.J. Pratt Medal. While continuing to write, Atwood turned into a lecturer in English on the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, from 1964 to 1965, Instructor in English on the Sir George Williams University in Montreal from 1967 to 1968, and taught on the University of Alberta from 1969 to 1970.[27] In 1966, The Circle Game was posted, winning the Governor General's Award.[28] This series changed into observed via three different small press collections of poetry: Kaleidoscopes Baroque: a poem, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1965); Talismans for Children, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1965); and Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1966); in addition to, The Animals in That Country (1968). Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. As a social satire of North American consumerism, many critics have often referred to the radical as an early example of the feminist concerns found in many of Atwood's works.
Seventies
Atwood taught at York University in Toronto from 1971 to 1972 and became a creator in residence on the University of Toronto at some point of the 1972/1973 academic year. Atwood posted six collections of poetry over the course of the decade: The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Procedures for Underground (1970), Power Politics (1971), You Are Happy (1974), Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1976), and Two-Headed Poems (1978). Atwood also posted 3 novels at some point of this time: Surfacing (1972); Lady Oracle (1976); and Life Before Man (1979), which changed into a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Surfacing, Lady Oracle, and Life Before Man, like The Edible Woman, explore identity and social buildings of gender as they relate to subjects such as nationhood and sexual politics. In specific, Surfacing, at the side of her first non-fiction monograph, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), helped establish Atwood as an crucial and rising voice in Canadian literature. In 1977 Atwood posted her first brief story collection, Dancing Girls, which was the winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction.
By 1976, there has been such interest in Atwood, her works, and her existence that Maclean's declared her to be "Canada's maximum gossiped-about author."
Eighties
Atwood's literary reputation continued to upward thrust within the Nineteen Eighties with the booklet of Bodily Harm (1981); The Handmaid's Tale (1985), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and 1985 Governor General's Award and finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize; and Cat's Eye (1988), finalist for both the 1988 Governor General's Award[28] and the 1989 Booker Prize. Despite her distaste for literary labels, Atwood has considering that conceded to regarding The Handmaid's Tale as a piece of science fiction or, extra correctly, speculative fiction. As she has repeatedly referred to, "There's a precedent in actual life for the entirety in the e book. I decided not to position some thing in that someone someplace hadn't already achieved.
While reviewers and critics have been tempted to examine autobiographical factors of Atwood's lifestyles in her paintings, specially Cat's Eye, in general Atwood resists the choice of critics to study too carefully for an writer's lifestyles in their writing. Filmmaker Michael Rubbo's Margaret Atwood: Once in August (1984) info the filmmaker's frustration in uncovering autobiographical proof and idea in Atwood's works.
During the Eighties, Atwood endured to train, serving because the MFA Honorary Chair the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, 1985; the Berg Professor of English, New York University, 1986; Writer-in-Residence, Macquarie University, Australia, 1987; and Writer-in-Residence, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, 1989. Regarding her stints with teaching, she has mentioned, "Success for me intended no longer having to train at college.
Nineties
Atwood's reputation as a writer continued to develop with the ebook of the novels The Robber Bride (1993), finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award and shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and Alias Grace (1996), winner of the 1996 Giller Prize, finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize, finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Award, and shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction. Although hugely extraordinary in context and shape, each novels use female characters to question precise and evil and morality via their portrayal of woman villains. As Atwood mentioned about The Robber Bride, "I'm no longer making a case for evil conduct, however unless you have a few girls characters portrayed as evil characters, you are no longer playing with a complete range. The Robber Bride takes region in contemporary Toronto, whilst Alias Grace is a work of historic fiction detailing the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Atwood had formerly written the 1974 CBC made-for-TV film The Servant Girl, about the lifestyles of Grace Marks, the younger servant who, along with James McDermott, turned into convicted of the crime. Atwood persevered her poetry contributions by using publishing Snake Woman in 1999 for the Women's Literature magazine Kalliope.
Novels
In 2000, Atwood published her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, to important acclaim, winning both the Booker Prize and the Hammett Prize in 2000. The Blind Assassin changed into also nominated for the Governor General's Award in 2000, Orange Prize for Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002. In 2001, Atwood changed into inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Atwood observed this success with the guide of Oryx and Crake in 2003, the primary novel in a series that still consists of The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), which would together come to be called the MaddAddam Trilogy. The apocalyptic vision in the MaddAddam Trilogy engages issues of genetic change, pharmaceutical and company manipulate, and man-made catastrophe. As a work of speculative fiction, Atwood notes of the era in Oryx and Crake, "I assume, for the first time in human records, we see in which we'd move. We can see a long way enough into the future to recognise that we can't pass at the way we've got been going all the time without inventing, probable, a lot of latest and various things. She later cautions inside the acknowledgements to MaddAddam, "Although MaddAddam is a piece of fiction, it does now not include any technologies or bio-beings that do not already exist, are not under creation or are not viable in concept.
In 2005, Atwood posted the novella The Penelopiad as part of the Canongate Myth Series. The story is a retelling of The Odyssey from the attitude of Penelope and a refrain of the twelve maids murdered on the stop of the unique story. The Penelopiad become given a theatrical manufacturing in 2007.
In 2016, Atwood posted the unconventional Hag-Seed, a contemporary-day retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as a part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare Series.
On November 28, 2018, Atwood introduced that she could post The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, in September 2019. The novel capabilities 3 lady narrators and takes area fifteen years after the man or woman Offred's very last scene in The Handmaid's Tale. The e book became introduced as the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize on October 14, 2019.
Non-fiction
In 2008, Atwood posted Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a set of five lectures brought as part of the Massey Lectures from October 12 to November 1, 2008. The e-book changed into launched in anticipation of the lectures, which were additionally recorded and broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas.
Chamber opera
In March 2008, Atwood commonplace a chamber opera fee. Commissioned by way of City Opera of Vancouver, Pauline is about in Vancouver in March 1913 at some stage in the very last days of the existence of Canadian author and performer Pauline Johnson. Pauline, composed by Tobin Stokes with libretto by using Atwood, premiered on May 23, 2014, at Vancouver's York Theatre.
Graphic fiction
In 2016, Atwood began writing the superhero comedian book collection Angel Catbird, with co-writer and illustrator Johnnie Christmas. The collection protagonist, scientist Strig Feleedus, is victim of an accidental mutation that leaves him with the frame parts and powers of each a cat and a chicken.[66] As together with her different works, Atwood notes of the series, "The form of speculative fiction about the destiny that I write is continually based on matters which might be in method right now. So it is now not that I believe them, it is that I notice that people are working on them and I take it some steps similarly down the road. So it would not pop out of nowhere, it comes out of real life.
Future Library mission
With her novel Scribbler Moon, Atwood is the first contributor to the Future Library task. The paintings, finished in 2015, turned into ceremonially exceeded over to the venture on May 27 of the identical 12 months. The e book will be held through the mission till its eventual publishing in 2114. She thinks that readers will probable need a paleo-anthropologist to translate a few parts of her tale. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Atwood stated, "There's some thing magical approximately it. It's like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for a hundred years after which they'll wake up, come to life once more. It's a fairytale period of time. She slept for one hundred years.
Invention of the LongPen
In early 2004, whilst at the paperback tour in Denver for her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood conceived the concept of a far flung robotic writing generation, what could later be called the LongPen, that might enable a person to remotely write in ink everywhere within the global thru pill PC and the Internet, as a consequence permitting her to behavior her ebook tours without being bodily gift. She quick based a corporation, Unotchit Inc., to increase, produce and distribute this generation. By 2011, the organisation shifted its marketplace awareness into business and legal transactions and changed into producing a range of products, for a diffusion of far off writing applications, based at the LongPen technology. In 2013, the corporation renamed itself to Syngrafii Inc. In 2021, it is cloud primarily based and offers Electronic signature-generation. As of May 2021, Atwood continues to be co-founder and a director of Syngrafii Inc. And holder of diverse patents related to the LongPen and related generation.
Poetry
In November 2020 Atwood posted Dearly, a collection of poems exploring absences and endings, aging and retrospection, and items and renewals. The critical poem, Dearly, became also published in The Guardian newspaper together with an essay exploring the passing of time, grief, and the way a poem belongs to the reader; that is accompanied through an audio recording of Atwood studying the poem on the newspaper's website.
Recurring subject matters and cultural contexts
Theory of Canadian identification
Atwood's contributions to the theorizing of Canadian identification have garnered interest both in Canada and internationally. Her essential paintings of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, is taken into consideration really previous, but stays a preferred creation to Canadian literature in Canadian research packages the world over. Writer and academic Joseph Pivato has criticised the ongoing reprinting of Survival by way of Anansi Press as a view-narrowing disservice to students of Canadian literature.
In Survival, Atwood postulates that Canadian literature, and via extension Canadian identification, is characterised by using the image of survival. This symbol is expressed within the omnipresent use of "victim positions" in Canadian literature. These positions represent a scale of self-consciousness and self-actualization for the victim in the "victor/sufferer" dating. The "victor" in those eventualities may be other humans, nature, the desolate tract or different external and inner elements which oppress the sufferer. Atwood's Survival bears the have an impact on of Northrop Frye's principle of garrison mentality; Atwood makes use of Frye's idea of Canada's preference to wall itself off from outdoor influence as a important tool to research Canadian literature. According to her theories in works such as Survival and her exploration of similar issues in her fiction, Atwood considers Canadian literature because the expression of Canadian identification. According to this literature, Canadian identification has been described with the aid of a fear of nature, with the aid of settler records, and with the aid of unquestioned adherence to the network. In an interview with the Scottish critic Bill Findlay in 1979, Atwood mentioned the connection of Canadian writers and writing to the 'Imperial Cultures' of America and Britain.
Atwood's contribution to the theorizing of Canada isn't constrained to her non-fiction works. Several of her works, such as The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and Surfacing, are examples of what postmodern literary theorist Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction. In such works, Atwood explicitly explores the relation of history and narrative and the methods of making history.
Among her contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood is a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize, in addition to a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary agency that seeks to inspire Canada's writing community.
