Margaret Atwood
18 November: MA born in Ottowa, Canada, to Margaret Dorothy, a former dietician and nutritionist and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist.
As an entomologist, her father used to work mostly in the forest and therefore she spent most of her childhood in the backwoods of Quebec. Writing was one of her many interests, away from school.
At 16, MA decides to become a professional writer.
MA is graduated from high school, and begins at Victoria College in the University of Toronto.
MA is graduated from the U of Toronto with a BA in English, with minors in philosophy and French. During her graduation, she publisheS her poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal
She privately prints a book of poems, Double Persephone, and wins the E.J. Pratt medal, given for the most outstanding collection of poems by a student at the University of Toronto.
MA earns a master’s degree from Harvard’s Radcliffe College, and will attempt further studies, but will be unable to finish her dissertation.
MA holds a one-year position as an instructor at the University of British Columbia.
MA's first collection of poetry, The Circle Game, receives the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor.
She begins teaching at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University.
MA marries Jim Polk, but the marriage lasts for only five years. They divorce in 1973.
MA's feminist novel, The Edible Woman, is published and acclaimed. It is thematically concerned with women's alienation, and centers on a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten.
MA takes another one-year position at York University.
She gets involved with nationalist cultural concerns as an editor for House of Anansi Press (1971-73) and as an editor and political cartoonist for This Magazine.
Surfacing is published. It's considered to be one of the best novels of her career.
In this novel, the technology-nature conflict is cast in political terms. As in her other novels, the protagonist goes through an archetypal retreat to the irrational — the wilderness, where she undergoes a transformation through contact with native and Québec cultures — before reintegrating into society.
She publishes Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. It is thought to be the most original book ever written about Canadian literature, and is still considered the standard introduction for Canadian studies programs internationally. In it, she argues that the central theme of Canadian literature, and culture as a whole, is survival, whether that is against the forces of nature or the forces of history, and that the paradigmatic character is the victim, which poses a problem for the development of a distinctive and positive Canadian identity. Since then Survival continues to shape the way Canadians look at their cultural heritage.
You Are Happy is another critical success. It includes a reworking of The Odyssey from Circe's perspective.
She begins a relationship with a fellow novelist, Graeme Gibson.
MA and Gibson have a daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson.
Her third novel, Lady Oracle, is a parody of fairy tales and Gothic romances. It wins the 1977 City of Toronto Book Award and a Canadian Booksellers Association Award.
Her short-story collection Dancing Girls wins the Periodical Distributors of Canada Short Fiction Award and the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction.
Two-Headed Poems, which explores the duplicity of language, and Up in the Tree, a children's book, are published.
Life Before Man is a more traditional novel than was her earlier fiction, developing a series of love triangles through exposition rather than poetic image. Each of the three principal characters have their own perspective on events occurring in each chapter.
She is elected the vice-chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, and begins to work with Amnesty International, which has an impact on the subject matter of True Stories, a book of poetry, and Bodily Harm, a novel appearing in 1981. In both works she "bears witness," breaking down distinctions she herself makes between poetry (at the heart of her relationship with language) and fiction (her moral vision of the world).
Her collected criticism, Second Words, contains some of the earliest feminist criticism written in Canada. Her editorship of the revised Oxford Book of Canadian Poetry affirms her central position among Canadian poets of her generation.
Her short-story collection, Bluebeard's Egg, wins the Periodical Distributors of Canada and the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters Book of the Year Award.
The Handmaid’s Tale, probably her most famous work, receives many awards and accolades, including another Governor General’s Award, the Los Angeles Times Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and the Commonwealth Literary Prize, and is also shortlisted for the Booker Prize (UK) and the Ritz-Paris-Hemingway Prize (Paris). MA calls it speculative fiction rather than science fiction, because she says that speculative fiction could happen.
She is honored as the "Humanist of the Year" by American Humanist Association.
Cat's Eye, a novel about a visual artist probing questions of subjectivity, creation and temporality, breaks literary ground for its exploration of the realm of childhood, with its shifts of power, its secrecies and betrayals. The book receives popular and critical acclaim, including the City of Toronto Book Award, the Coles Book of the Year Award, the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, and the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters in conjunction with Periodical Marketers of Canada Book of the Year Award. Cat's Eye is also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Robber Bride examines Toronto lifestyles and women's friendships. In it, three friends reflect upon their deceased university classmate, Zenia, who had stolen each of their boyfriends. Zenia, it turns out, had given them each a different life story, and in the end neither the characters, nor the reader, knows the ultimate truth. It wins the Canadian Authors Association Novel of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Prize for Canadian and Caribbean Region, and the 1994 Trillium Award.
Alias Grace, a murder fiction inspired by actual events, wins the Canadian Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award. It is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Extensive archival research into the life and times of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women in mid-19th-century Canada, led Atwood to revise her earlier perspective on this accused murderer and to question Susanna Moodie's opinion in Life in the Clearings (which MA had adopted in her 1974 TV script, "The Servant Girl"). Weaving together Marks's first-person fictional voice with 19th-century journalistic accounts and interviews, letters, traditional patchwork designs and poetry, the novel raises important questions about truth-telling and representation. How can we ever know another human being? How can we know what exactly happened in the past? The novel rejects the certainty of a verdict on Marks's actions. Instead, through the perspectives of representatives of the emerging 19th-century human sciences, Atwood plays one perspective against another, exposing the relations of power and the duplicity of language at the heart of our knowledge in law, history, literature and the media. It is her most sophisticated articulation of her long-standing philosophical and political concerns with power, culture and identity.
The Blind Assassin, a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop, receives mixed reviews. Like The Handmaid's Tale, the book portrays a dystopian future, with humanity brought to the verge of extinction by contemporary social trends and technologies. The novel is awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 and the Hammett Prize in 2001. It is also nominated for the Governor General's Award in 2000, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2000 and included it in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.
Oryx and Crake, a scientific dystopian novel, is shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. It is the first novel in the MaddAddam trilogy, that also includes The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). The apocalyptic vision in the MaddAddam Trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster. MA comments that "I think, for the first time in human history, we see where we might go. We can see far enough into the future to know that we can't go on the way we've been going forever without inventing, possibly, a lot of new and different things." She later cautions in the acknowledgements to MaddAddam, "Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or bio-beings that do not already exist, are not under construction or are not possible in theory."
In The Penelopiad, Atwood invites readers to reconsider the story of Homer's Odyssey as she adopts the perspective and voice of Penelope, backed by a chorus of maidens. Her stage adaptation of The Penelopiad is premiered by England's Royal Shakespeare Company in July 2007.
Scribbler Moon is the first contribution to the Future Library project. The work is handed over to the project, but will not be published until 2114. MA claims that readers will probably need a paleo-anthropologist to translate some parts of her story. In an interview, she says, "There's something magical about it. It's like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they'll wake up, come to life again. It's a fairytale length of time."
MA begins writing the superhero comic book series Angel Catbird, with co-creator and illustrator Johnnie Christmas. The series protagonist, scientist Strig Feleedus, is victim of an accidental mutation that leaves him with the body parts and powers of both a cat and a bird. As with her other works, MA notes of the series, "The kind of speculative fiction about the future that I write is always based on things that are in process right now. So it's not that I imagine them, it's that I notice that people are working on them and I take it a few steps further down the road. So it doesn't come out of nowhere, it comes out of real life."
The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, is published in September. The novel features three female narrators and takes place fifteen years after the character Offred's final scene in The Handmaid's Tale. It is the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, along with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other.