Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born the middle child of three to her entomologist father and dietician mother in 1939. Due to her father’s study of forest-dwelling insects, Atwood and her family spent much of their time in rural Quebec and traveling between Ottawa and Toronto. Although Atwood was an avid writer from the age of six, penning poems and small plays, she did not attend school full-time until age 12. By 16, Atwood was determined to be a professional writer, and after graduating high school in Leaside, Toronto in 1957, studied at the University of Toronto, where she began publishing her work in the university’s literary journal. In 1961, Atwood moved to Radcliffe College (Harvard’s corollary institution for women, since Harvard was male-only at the time) where she earned a master’s degree and began working on her doctorate, though she abandoned her dissertation midway through. Atwood published her first work in 1961, a book of poetry that won the E.J. Pratt Medal. Throughout the 1960s, Atwood continued to write while working as a college lecturer at several universities in Canada, publishing a number of popular novels, articles, and poetry volumes into the 1970s, several of which won awards. It was not until the 1980s, however, that Atwood’s career truly took off, particularly with the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Cat’s Eye in 1988. Atwood continued to write successful novels, though her next most notable achievement came in 2000 with the publication of The Blind Assassin, which won the Man Booker Prize and was widely lauded by critics. In 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale was made into a TV series, which Atwood advises on, and in 2019 she published The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.