Daughter of Carl Edmund Atwood, entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killiam, former nutritionist, Margaret Eleanor “Peggy” Atwood was born at the end of 1939 in the city of Ontario, Canada. This is the second of their three children, the youngest Ruth will not join the siblings until 1951. Due to Carl’s research on insects foresters, the family leaves for the wild nature of northern Quebec each spring, and does not return to town untilfall.
The education of children is unconventional. Their mother educates Margaret and her older brother Harold Leslie in the morning, the rest of the day they are free. Living in the middle of the forest, Margaret immersed herself in books very early on to pass the time. She will not be fully educated in Toronto until she is 8 years old. It was in high school that she decided to become a writer. In 1961, she graduated from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and continued her studies at Radcliffe College and then at Harvard University, but without completing her thesis entitled The English Metaphysical Romance. Subsequently, it becomes professor of English in various Canadian and American universities.
Career as a poet and writer
In 1961, his first book of poetry Double Persephone was published by Hawkshead Press and won the EJ Pratt Medal. During the 60s, she continued with four other collections Le Cercle vicieux, Expeditions, Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, 1966 and The Animals in That Country, 1968. She then published The Edible Woman, her first novel with grating humor in 1969. This is a work about the place of a woman about to get married in a society of overconsumption. The year before this publication, Margaret Atwood married Jim Polk to divorce 5 years later. Subsequently, she married novelist Graeme Gibson and gave birth to her daughter Eleanor Jess in May 1976.
This is his novel The Scarlet Handmaid released in 1985 which allows it to achieve great popularity. Thanks to this dystopian story which will be repeated in film and in series, she wins the Arthur C. Clarke Prize of 1987. After this great success, she continues to write and wins many prizes such as the Booker Prize in 2000 for her novel The Blind Killer as well as in 2019 for Wills, the expected sequel to The Scarlet Handmaid.
Works
The Scarlet Handmaid (1985)
Wills (2019)
Cat’s eye (1988)
The Last Man (2003)
The Time of the Flood (2009)
MaddAdam (2013)
The vicious circle (1964)
The Blind Killer (2000)
Captive (1996)
The edible woman (1969)
It’s the heart that lets go last (2015)
Penelope’s Odyssey (2005)
.
fs4