The Handmaid's Tale (34 page)

Authors: Margaret Atwood

Tags: #Man-Woman Relationships, #Fantasy Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Fantasy, #Misogyny, #Fiction, #Women

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Biography

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

The daughter of a forest entomologist, Atwood spent a large part of her childhood in the Canadian wilderness. At the age of six she began to write "poems, morality plays, comic books, and an unfinished novel about an ant." At sixteen she found that writing was "suddenly the only thing I wanted to do."

Throughout her career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees, including the Canadian Governor General's Award, Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. She is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including children's books and short stories. Her most recent works include the novels
Cat's Eye
(1989),
The Robber Bride
(1993),
Alias Grace
(1996), and
The Blind Assassin
(2000); the story collection
Good Bones and Simple Murders
(1994); and a volume of poetry,
Morning in the Burned House
(1995).

Atwood's work has been published in more than twenty-five countries. She has traveled extensively and has lived in Boston, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Provence, Berlin, and Edinburgh.

Margaret Atwood now lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and their daughter.

The Margaret Atwood Society, whose main goal is to promote scholarly study of Atwood's work, publishes an annual newsletter with annotated bibliography, as well as a midyear issue; and, as an official MLA Allied Organization, it meets annually in conjunction with the Modern Language Association convention. For membership, contact Mary Kirtz, Department of English, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio 44325.

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