Margaret Atwood

Standard Name: Atwood, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Nickname: Peggy Atwood
Indexed Name: M. E. Atwood
Well before the end of the twentieth century MA had become one of Canada's leading writers in multiple genres. She now writes for a global audience who read her more than forty novels , poetry,short stories, criticism, lectures, editing of anthologies, and experiments with new, mixed, and digital genres.
Black-and-white photo of Margaret Atwood standing at a podium and speaking into a microphone, gesturing with her hands, 5 April 1973.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Toni Morrison
TM won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Black writers and critics had protested when it did not receive a National Book Award.
Cooke, Rachel. “America is going backwards”. The Observer, 19 Sept. 2004, p. 15.
15
Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Twayne, 1990.
xiv
She said of this novel, I am not interested in...
Literary responses Naomi Alderman
Reviewer Sarah Ditum concluded: The slide from tweaked normality to plausible horror is realised here as perfectly as in the best of John Wyndham or Margaret Atwood in a version of the future [that] detonates...
Literary responses Carol Shields
The back cover of the Vintage Canada edition of 1995 quoted Margaret Atwood calling this [o]ne of the best novels I have read . . . deft, funny, poignant, and surprising and beautifully shaped.
Shields, Carol. Swann: A Mystery. Vintage Canada, 1995.
back cover
Literary responses Susan Hill
Margaret Atwood in the New York Times Book Review called this work less a novel than the portrait of an emotion,
qtd. in
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
and likened it to a handmade quilt, as an intricate, carefully worked celebration of...
Literary responses Tillie Olsen
Margaret Atwood praised the message but faulted the scrapbook form (as did other commentators, too). Joyce Carol Oates in the New Republic criticised the book for inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
279
Book Review Index. Gale Research.
4 (1969-1979): 355
Pearlman, Mickey, and Abby H. P. Werlock. Tillie Olsen. Twayne, 1991.
143
Literary responses Carol Shields
According to Margaret Atwood , Unless was shortlisted for just about every major English-language prize, but Shields had reached such eminence that she now inhabited the stratosphere, far beyond the ken of juries.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, 26 Aug. 2003, p. 28.
28
English...
Literary responses Carol Shields
CS held the Order of Canada and the Order of Manitoba, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .
Clark, Alex. “Carol Shields”. The Guardian, 18 July 2003, p. 23.
23
After she died, Margaret Atwood identified her forte as the extraordinariness of ordinary people.
qtd. in
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, 26 Aug. 2003, p. 28.
28
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
David Coward , reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, commended HM 's bravura display of her endlessly inventive, eerily observant style. He praised her prose, maintaining that Words are the real heroes...
Literary responses Anne Sexton
AS accepted the label confessional poet, although many commentators made that a basis from which to denigrate her work. Erica Jong argued that this label downplays the element of achieved skill, wrongly suggesting that...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
This novel won the Hawthornden Prize the year after publication.It received generally enthusiastic reviews, although Anita Brookner evinced a degree of wariness in her comment: The novel, though expert, is unsettling. It is unsettling through...
Literary responses Adrienne Rich
Rich was during her lifetime and still is widely acclaimed and honoured as a major poet, theorist, and critic of culture. Her poetry and prose have been examined in literary and social criticism, and in...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
Colin Burrow found this novel brilliant, perhaps perverse, offering substantial and deep pleasure to the reader, excelling particularly when the historical record is uncertain or contradictory, well able to stand comparison with the portrait of...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
Margaret Atwood (who confessed to a weakness for HM ) wrote that the character of Cromwell matches her particular strengths and praised the exercise here of her talent for intricacy and literary invention.
Atwood, Margaret. “Here comes a chopper . . ”. The Guardian, 5 May 2012, p. Review 6.
Review 6
Material Conditions of Writing Fay Weldon
Critic Olga Kenyon points out that the economic independence resulting from very hard work has enabled women writers like FW , Beryl Bainbridge , and Margaret Atwood to take certain freedoms in their approaches to...
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. McClelland and Stewart, 1976.
Atwood, Margaret. Life Before Man. McClelland and Stewart, 1979.
Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood: Get back on the horse that threw youThe Guardian, p. Review 2.
Atwood, Margaret. “Monument to a Dead Self”. New York Times Book Review.
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder. Bloomsbury, 2006.
Atwood, Margaret. Morning in the Burned House. McClelland and Stewart, 1995.
Atwood, Margaret. Moving Targets. House of Anansi Press, 2004.
Atwood, Margaret. “My hero: George Orwell”. Guardian Weekly, p. 39.
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead. Anchor Books, 2003.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. McClelland and Stewart, 2003.
Atwood, Margaret. “Our faith is fraying in the god of money”. Financial Times.
Atwood, Margaret. “Oursonette”. The Globe and Mail, p. B8.
Atwood, Margaret. Payback. Anansi Press, 2008.
Atwood, Margaret, and Charles Pachter. Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein. Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1966.
Atwood, Margaret. Stone Mattress. Doubleday / Nan A. Talese, 2014.
Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things. Clarendon, 1995.
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. McClelland and Stewart, 1972.
Atwood, Margaret. Survival. Anansi, 1972.
Atwood, Margaret. The Animals in That Country. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. McClelland and Stewart, 2000.
Atwood, Margaret. The Burgess Shale. University of Alberta Press; CLC, 2017.
Atwood, Margaret. The CanLit Foodbook. Totem, 1987.
Atwood, Margaret. The Circle Game. Anansi, 1966.
Atwood, Margaret. The Door: Poems. Virago, 2007.
Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. McClelland and Stewart, 1969.