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
Textual Features Nawal El Saadawi
The Imam rules and tyrannizes over an imaginary island. The rebellious heroine, Bint Allah (which means daughter of God), appears to have been illegitimately fathered by the Imam, and while it seems appropriate to...
Textual Features Susanna Moodie
Another personal narrative, but with less of the autobiographical in it than its predecessor, this book takes its structure from the succession of places passed through and people met on a recent trip to Niagara...
Textual Features Fay Weldon
FW has summarised the topics of The Fat Woman's Joke as food, fatness, sex and housework, which, she says, made it revolutionary in its day, though by the early twenty-first century these topics had become...
Reception Alice Munro
More than her previous collection, this volume established AM 's reputation. In Britain she was hailed by Julian Symons as interesting . . . remarkable, and (along with Margaret Atwood ) as distinctly Canadian...
Reception Carol Shields
Its author called this a feel-good book.
Wachtel, Eleanor, editor. “Carol Shields”. More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, Vintage Canada, pp. 36-56.
56
According to Margaret Atwood it sold particularly well in Britain, boosting Shields's international status.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
28
Reception Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson , centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception Sylvia Plath
Other recipients of this award include Denise Levertov (1960), Adrienne Rich (1963), Erica Jong (1971), and Margaret Atwood (1974).
Modern Poetry Association,. Poetry. http://www.poetrymagazine.org.
Reception Margaret Forster
In a National Women's Register poll of members to determine the best woman writer of the twentieth century, MF came third with twenty-one votes, just behind Margaret Atwood with twenty-five and just ahead of Enid Blyton
Publishing A. S. Byatt
She thought of the title and the central idea for the novel in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn , and thinking of the poet possessing his critic, and of the...
Author summary Susanna Moodie
SM is best remembered for her first-person narrative of pioneer life in Canada, Roughing It in the Bush, 1852, considered a foundational work of Canadian literature. She was a prolific author who wrote...
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 ,...
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...
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,
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
and likened it to a handmade quilt, as an intricate, carefully worked celebration of...
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.
back cover
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Atwood, Margaret. Life Before Man. McClelland and Stewart, 1979.
Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood: <span data-tei-ns-tag="">Get back on the horse that threw you</span&gt”;. The 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.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart, 1985.