Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (b. 1939) was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killam, a nutritionist. She spent much of her childhood in the northern Ontario and Quebec bush, where her father conducted field research — an experience that gave her an intimate knowledge of the Canadian wilderness and a lifelong preoccupation with survival. She studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto (where she was taught by Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson), and earned a master’s degree from Radcliffe College, Harvard.

Life and Career

Atwood published her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, in 1961, and by the late 1960s was established as one of Canada’s leading poets. Her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), was a comic-satirical story about a woman who cannot eat — an early exploration of the themes of female identity, autonomy, and social expectation that would dominate her fiction.

Surfacing (1972) — a woman’s journey into the Canadian wilderness in search of her missing father — established her as a major novelist. Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), and Bodily Harm (1981) followed in quick succession.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was the breakthrough: a dystopian novel set in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic state that has replaced the United States, where women are reduced to their reproductive function. Offred, the handmaid narrator, is forced to bear children for the ruling class. The novel was a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and became one of the most widely read and taught novels of the twentieth century. The Hulu television adaptation (2017–present) brought it to an even wider audience, and its imagery — the red cloaks and white bonnets — became symbols of feminist protest worldwide.

Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and Alias Grace (1996) were major literary novels. The Blind Assassin (2000), a novel-within-a-novel about two sisters in twentieth-century Canada, won the Booker Prize.

The MaddAddam Trilogy — Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013) — is her most ambitious speculative fiction: a post-apocalyptic vision of a world destroyed by corporate biotechnology.

The Testaments (2019), a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale set fifteen years later, won the Booker Prize (shared with Bernardine Evaristo), making Atwood a two-time winner.

Poetry and Criticism

Atwood is not only a novelist. She has published over twenty collections of poetry, including The Circle Game (1966, winner of the Governor General’s Award), Power Politics (1971), and Morning in the Burned House (1995). Her poetry is compressed, ironic, and often darkly funny — sharing the precision and political intelligence of her fiction.

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) was her most influential critical work — an argument that the central theme of Canadian literature is survival (physical, cultural, and psychological), as opposed to the frontier optimism of American literature or the island mentality of British literature. The book defined a generation of Canadian literary criticism, even as subsequent scholars challenged its framework.

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) is her most personal essay collection — a meditation on why writers write, on the relationship between the author and the text, and on the metaphor of the writer as a visitor to the underworld.

Themes and Legacy

Atwood’s fiction consistently addresses gender, power, storytelling, survival, and the relationship between the individual and the state. She writes about women with psychological precision and political acuity, and her speculative fiction — which she prefers to call “speculative” rather than “science” fiction, insisting on the distinction between extrapolation from existing technologies and pure invention — extrapolates present-day tendencies into plausible future scenarios.

She is universally acknowledged as one of the most important living writers in the English language. Her influence spans literary fiction, speculative fiction, feminism, environmentalism, and cultural criticism. She has received the Booker Prize twice, the PEN Pinter Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, and virtually every other literary honour available, and has been frequently mentioned for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Key Works

• The Edible Woman (1969)
• Surfacing (1972)
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• Cat’s Eye (1988)
• The Robber Bride (1993)
• Alias Grace (1996)
• The Blind Assassin (2000)
• Oryx and Crake (2003)
• The Year of the Flood (2009)
• The Testaments (2019)

Collecting Atwood

Margaret Atwood is one of the most collected living authors, with a vast bibliography spanning six decades.

The Edible Woman (1969, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto) — the Canadian first — is her first novel and a genuine rarity. Fine copies bring C$500–C$2,000.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto — the true first, preceding the US edition from Houghton Mifflin) is the supreme collecting prize. Fine Canadian first editions in jacket bring $1,000–$4,000; the US first (1986) brings $500–$2,000. Signed copies command substantial premiums.

The Blind Assassin (2000, McClelland and Stewart) — Booker Prize winner — is sought at $100–$400.

Atwood is an enthusiastic signer who has done extensive touring throughout her long career. She invented the LongPen, a remote signing device, which she has used at virtual events. Signed copies of most titles are available.