Margaret Atwood was
born on November 18th, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario. She was born to the
Atwood family as the second child to Carl Edmund Atwood, a forest
entomologist and Margaret Dorothy Killam who has a master degree of
Home Economics from University of Toronto. After the years of Carl
Atwood's research in northern Quebec and Ontario, the Atwood family
settles in Toronto where the father took the teaching position in
University of Toronto.
Atwood's
talent in writing started to attract attention when she was still a
student in Leaside High School where she conttributed prose and verse
to school literary magazine. Influenced by her father's work, Atwood
was fascinated by the nature and hence had been sharpening her keen
sense of observation that made her well-equipped to her writing career
later in her life.
As
an honors English student at Victoria College in UT, she won the E.J.
Pratt medal with her poem "Double Persephone" and later the Woodrow
Wilson Fellowship. During her graduate studies in English at Radcliffe
College in Harvard University, she studied Victorian literature under
the prestigious professor Jerome Buckley, and there she gained her M.A.
When she later continued to work for her doctoral studies, she began to
write novels, two of which are Up in the Air So Blue and The Edible
Woman: the former is as yet published till today whereas the latter was
published in 1969 in which Atwood used her working experience in a
market-research company as a background of the protagonist.
Though
she has finished all of the required credits for her doctoral degree,
she began her professional writing career and started to teach in
universities without having her dissertation completed. She continued
her writing of prose, poems and novels, and by the time she married
James Polk when she was twenty-eight years old, she aroused the public
attention with her award-winning poetry The Circle Game. After The
Edible Woman was published, Atwood began to travel in Europe. When she
returned from Europe, and soon after her teaching at York University in
Toronto, she separated with her American novelist husband James Polk
and moved to Alliston Ontario with Graeme Gibson.
In
1976, Atwood's daughter Jess was born. Besides her previous attempt of
contributing a comic strip under the pseudonym Bart Gerrard, Atwood
began to write for children as well. In the early eighties, she spent
several years traveling and working in Europe, mostly in Germany and
England. Her Europe trip has probably helped her a lot in her writing
so that she spent some time in France in the early nineties and publish
Good Bones, The Robber Bride around that time. Atwood spent most of her
time in Toronto after her trip to France and her teaching in the
States. She is now living in Toronto with Gibson and Jess.
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Throughout her early
works, Atwood created numerous heroines that state her concerns about
women's issues of her time in the 60s and 70s; issues such as eating
disorder, women's awakening, advancement of female rights, Ecofeminism
have all appeared in her characterization. In her later novels, she not
merely continues her discussion and exploration in these issues but
further expands her literary tentacles toward political level. Several
of her later long-length novels, such as The Blind Assassin (2000) and
Oryx and Crake (2004) appear with complicated characterization,
entangled with sophisticated observation toward nowadays feminists
concerns and political environment in our contemporary time.
Atwood
writes with exquisite techniques that derive from, according to
herself, her childhood experience of observation on insects and plants,
and her interest in botany. Literary critics observes some techniques
that she is in favor of using in her novels, such as the use of double,
duality, mirroring, satirical writing, fairy-tale revisions, rewriting
and representation, and so on. She uses these writing techniques to
elaborate further her critiques on specific societal or political
situation of our time and create a mocking voice that warns her readers
the effects and stakes that come along with the cause human being has
created.
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