The Canadian writer Margaret Eleanor Atwood He was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario. She is well known for her fictional prose and for her feminist perspective.
When I was a teenager Atwood he divided his time between Toronto, his family’s main residence, and the sparsely populated region of northern Canada, where his father, an entomologist, did research. He began writing at the age of five and resumed his efforts, more seriously, a decade later. After completing his undergraduate studies at Victoria College, University of Toronto, he obtained a Master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962.
In his early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised 1966) and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood it reflects on human behavior, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurring themes in her novels, all of which focus on women seeking their relationship with the world and the people around them.
The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid’s Tale 1985, film 1990, dramatized adaptation 2000) is built around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future, which has taken power as a result of ecological upheaval; a television series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was written by Atwood.
Other novels by Atwood include the surreal The edible woman (1969); Resurface (1972, 1981 film), an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture that focuses on a woman’s return to her childhood home in the northern Quebec desert; Doña Oracle (1976); Cat Eye (1988); The thief bride (1993, TV movie 2007); Y Alias Grace (1996), a fictional account of a real-life Canadian girl, who was convicted of two murders in a tabloid trial in 1843; a TV miniseries based on the latter work aired in 2017, written by Atwood and Sarah Polley.
On Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood described a plague-induced apocalypse in the near future, through the observations and recollections of a protagonist who is possibly the sole survivor of the event. The minor characters in that book retell the dystopian story from their perspectives in The year of the flood (2009). Maddaddam (2013), which continues to draw on the biblical, eschatological, and anti-corporate threads that run through previous novels, brings the satirical trilogy to an end.
Atwood he also wrote short stories, collected in volumes such as Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), Moral Disorder (2006) and Stone mattress (2014). His non-fiction includes Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer in Writing (2002), which emerged from a series of lectures he gave at the University of Cambridge; Payback (2008; 2012 film), a passionate essay that treats debt, both personal and governmental, as a cultural problem rather than a political or economic one; Y In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), in which he illustrates his relationship with science fiction. Atwood wrote the libretto for the opera Pauline, about the Canadian Indian poet Pauline Johnson; premiered at the York Theater in Vancouver in 2014.
Besides writing, Atwood he taught English literature at various Canadian and American universities. He won the PEN Pinter Award in 2016 for his spirit of political activism that runs through his life and work.