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 Production Jeanette Winterson
The other opening title was Margaret Atwood 's The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus.
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...
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...
Literary responses Marina Warner
Many enthusiastic reviews followed the book's publication. Margaret Atwood , in the Los Angeles Times Book Review found it crammed full of goodies . . . and profusely illustrated, as well as simply essential reading...
Textual Production Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Production Ali Smith
With her background in academia and her work reviewing fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian, AS has produced an impressive amount of literary criticism. She has written critical introductions for reissues of work...
Friends, Associates Carol Shields
CS , who had said that in the 1960s she knew no writers, became a personal friend of her fellow author Alice Munro , who called her (according to Margaret Atwood ) just a luminous person.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
28
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
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
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, p. 28.
28
English...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Shields
She maintains that the emergence of a Canadian Literature narrative has slightly distorted perceptions of SM (whose literary accomplishment she rates only very moderately), but that study of Moodie's four novels can shed light on...
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, p. 23.
23
After she died, Margaret Atwood identified her forte as the extraordinariness of ordinary people.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
28
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Shelley
The legacy of Frankenstein is immense and widely diffused. It has been successfully filmed not once but several times, as simple horror movie and as intellectualised retelling with a gruesome birth scene only marginally connected...
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 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...

Timeline

December 1953: Hugh Hefner launched his magazine Playboy,...

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December 1953

Hugh Hefner launched his magazine Playboy, published in Chicago. The first issue featured a previously unpublished nude photo of Marilyn Monroe .

May 1978: Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern...

Women writers item

May 1978

Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.

January 1996: Virago Press resumed operations as an imprint...

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January 1996

Virago Press resumed operations as an imprint of another larger company, Little Brown . Its board took the decision to sell in 1995, two years after its twentieth birthday.

10 October 2006: Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for...

Writing climate item

10 October 2006

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.

26 September 2009: The Guardian newspaper carried a number of...

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26 September 2009

The Guardian newspaper carried a number of poems and short prose pieces commissioned in support of the 10:10 initiative to reduce carbon emissions.

Texts

Atwood, Margaret. “’Little Chappies With Breasts’”. New York Times Book Review, p. 11.
Atwood, Margaret. “A Nobel for our times”. Guardian Weekly, p. 16.
Atwood, Margaret. A Quiet Game, and Other Early Works. Editors Chung, Kathy and Sherrill Grace, Juvenilia Press, 1997.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. McClelland and Stewart, 1996.
Atwood, Margaret, and Johnnie Christmas. Angel Catbird. Dark Horse Books, 2016.
Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard’s Egg. McClelland and Stewart, 1983.
Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. McClelland and Stewart, 1981.
Atwood, Margaret. Bottle. Hay Festival Press, 2004, http://PS 8551 T97 B75 2004 Special Collections.
Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. McClelland and Stewart, 1988.
Atwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls and Other Stories. McClelland and Stewart, 1977.
Atwood, Margaret. Double Persephone. Toronto, ON, 1961.
Guppy, Shusha et al. “Edna O’Brien”. Women Writers at Work: The <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl="j">Paris Review</span> Interviews, edited by George Plimpton and George Plimpton, Viking, 1989, pp. 337-59.
McMaster, Juliet, and Margaret Atwood. “Foreword”. A Quiet Game, and Other Early Works, edited by Kathy Chung et al., Juvenilia Press, 1997, p. vi.
Atwood, Margaret, and Christian Ward. “Freeforall”. The Guardian, pp. 59-63.
Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones. Coach House Press, 1992.
Atwood, Margaret. “Guardian book club”. The Guardian, p. Review 7.
Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed. Knopf Canada, 2016.
Atwood, Margaret. “Here comes a chopper . . ”. The Guardian, p. Review 6.
Atwood, Margaret. “How I fell for Twitter”. The Guardian, p. 35.
Atwood, Margaret. I’m Starved for You. Byliner Fiction, 2012.
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Signal, 2011.
Atwood, Margaret. Interlunar. Oxford University Press, 1984.
Grace, Sherrill, and Margaret Atwood. “Introduction”. A Quiet Game, and Other Early Works, edited by Kathy Chung et al., Juvenilia Press, 1997, p. vii - xiv.
Carrière, Marie, and Margaret Atwood. “Introduction”. The Burgess Shale, University of Alberta Press; CLC, 2017, p. ix - xii.
Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. McClelland and Stewart, 1976.