Margaret Atwood, in full Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt CH FRSC FRSL, b. November 18, 1939
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Surfacing (1971)
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Bluebeard’s Egg (1982)
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
I used to believe that having a good memory was a blessing, but I’m no longer so sure. Maybe forgetting is the blessing.
Old Babes in the Wood (2023)
Author, literary critic and environmental activist. Ms. Atwood has penned more than 50 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, critical essays, and graphic novels. Her oeuvre is at once accomplished and extensive (obvs), and while all her work is notable, I’ve listed the books with which I am most familiar: The Circle Game (1964); The Edible Woman (1969); Survival (1972); Surfacing (1972); Lady Oracle (1976); Life Before Man (1979); Bodily Harm (1981); Murder in the Dark (1983); The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Cat’s Eye (1988); The Robber Bride (1993); Alias Grace (1996); The Blind Assassin (2000); Oryx and Crake (2003); Moral Disorder (2006); The Heart Goes Last (2015); Hag-Seed (2016); The Testaments (2019); Old Babes in the Wood (2023).
A brief biography can be accessed though this link: https://margaretatwood.ca/biography/
Ms. Atwood’s full bibliography may be read here: https://margaretatwood.ca/full-bibliography-2/
I’ve put together a list of lesser known bits about our CanLit icon, listed in the order of discovery which may not be, well, isn’t, chronological. Heads up, it’s lengthy post, just as it should be, given her phenomenal number of contributions, her interests and curiosities, but is broken into short, easy to read pieces. It is my intention that what I’ve written is accurate, however, that said, I combed through many pages and articles, so please allow for marginal error.
I read that Ms. Atwood’s literary office goes by the anagram ‘O. W. Toad’ (the letters of her last name) and in the room where she writes, she has two desks, one with Internet and one without.
She wrote her first novel about an ant when she was 7 years old and thought up her first poem while she walked home from high school across a football field.
This woman, the legend, is clearly full of surprises: I’d read somewhere that she did not attend school until she was 12, though some sources said 8. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist; her mother, a dietitian and nutritionist. Her father’s work meant that the family spent much of Atwood’s childhood years in the backwoods of northern Québec. They travelled a lot, back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto and in between. Regardless, she was a voracious reader as were her siblings, a sister, Ruth, and a brother, Harold.
In the 1970s, Atwood was an editor at Anansi Press. She was also a political cartoonist for This Magazine. Her first children’s book, Up In The Tree for which she drew the illustrations was published in 1978. She often creates the covers for her own books and she paints, I learned, wonderful watercolours.
Arguably the most honoured writer in Canadian history, Margaret Atwood has over 50 prestigious literary awards and has at least 20 honorary degrees to her credit.She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973 and was promoted to Companion in 1981. She received the Order of Ontario in 1990. She has won 2 Governor General’s Literary Awards (1 for poetry, 1 for fiction), two Booker Prizes, 2 City of Toronto Book Awards, 4 Canadian Booksellers Association Awards, 3 Trillium Book Awards, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and a National Arts Award. As well, Ms. Atwood has received a Molson Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, the London Literature Award, the Welsh Arts Council International Writer’s Prize, the PEN Pinter Prize, the US National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (Spain). Atwood is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the American Society of Arts and Letters, and a Chevalier of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Also? She has also received lifetime achievements awards from the Canadian Booksellers Association, the US National Book Critics Circle, and PEN Canada. In 2018, she received the Academy Board of Directors’ Tribute at the Canadian Screen Awards for ‘her commitments to the growth of the Canadian media industry’. Canada Post issued a permanent commemorative stamp in her honour in 2021.
In 1987, Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
She calls herself a ‘misguided feminist’. To clarify, she fights ‘for equality without labels’, said that ‘men have behaved badly for too long’, and that while she calls for all women to be listened to and their words taken seriously, we need also to be guided by facts rather than statements not substantiated.
Environmental problems, in particular, climate change and ocean pollution, weigh heavily on her. She wants us all (as we should) to save the oceans (and the planet and ourselves) before oxygen levels become catastrophically low. Atwood donated her Booker Prize (2019) money to charities who specialize in saving endangered species.
In 2014, Scottish artist Katie Paterson launched the ‘Library of the Future’, a project in which contemporary writers donate one of their works each year. The texts are expected to remain unread until the year 2114. Ms. Atwood was one of the first to join the initiative and supplied her manuscript, Scribbler Moon in May 2015.
The Edible Woman (1969) sat in her publisher’s drawer for 2 years. It was only when she won a Governor General’s Award for her poetry that it was pulled out and published.
Ms. Atwood wrote a libretto called Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man and Two Androids (1970).
She owns a remarkably cool hat made out of newspaper, cardboard and plastic bags.
She is a co-founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize. and a co-founder of PEN Canada.
Atwood was 9 when she first read Animal Farm by George Orwell. She’d thought it was an innocent kids’ book about animals. Also? She loved Tinkertoys.
Initially, she named Crake. in Oryx and Crake, Glenn, for Glenn Gould.
In 2006, she contributed a baked lemon custard recipe to Bon Appétit. The Epicurious reviews report that it’s very good. There is no doubt in my mind.
She said, in her high school yearbook, that she intended to write the Great Canadian Novel.
She reads The Onion.
Atwood wrote the lyrics for a rock song, ‘Frankenstein Monster Song’.
Listen here: https://youtu.be/7R4Ja2k0-Qg?si=mwcBidm8Oe_wyVaE
She’ll tell you that she is poor as a typer and as a speller.
She doesn’t like multitasking.
She was an underground comics artist and under the pseudonym (her nom de plume) Bart Gerrard, she drew a comic strip called ‘Kanadian Kulture Komics’ for This Magazine.
Atwood follows no particular routine to write, nor does she write every day.
She is the only author to have had her books featured 3 times on CBC’s Canada Reads.
She produced a home economics themed opera in 1956 about 3 fabrics: Orlon, Nylon and Dacron.
I read that Ms. Atwood has had the same agent since 1971.
When she went to university (University of Toronto), she read her poems at The Bohemian Embassy coffee shop where Lorne Michaels and Gordon Lightfoot also performed.
She gave Graeme Gibson, her long time partner, a T-shirt that said ‘Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson.’
Ms. Atwood has an irregular heartbeat, inherited from her father.
Every so often, she knits. I read that she once knitted a rabbit that looked more like a rat for a grandchild.
Her roommates at Harvard burned her Hush Puppies shoes.
Adept at all she takes on, she is an accomplished cake decorator.
She always starts to write with a pen or pencil and paper.
She will eat bugs, and especially enjoys giant locusts.
In 1967, she wrote a poem, The Green Man, about the Boston strangler.
Her first book signing, for The Edible Woman, was in the Edmonton Hudson’s Bay store, in the men’s sock and underwear department.
She made a craft beer in honour of her book, MaddAddam which was published in 2013.
Atwood invented the LongPen, which is a device that allows an author to remotely sign, in ink, from anywhere in the world, via tablet, PC, the Internet and a robotic hand. LongPen also supports an audio and video conversation between the endpoints, such as a fan and author, while the book is being signed. The system was used by Conrad Black, who was under arrest, to ‘attend’, but not really, a book signing event without leaving his home.
She has a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.
She saw her first balloon on her sixth birthday. It had been saved since before the Second World War and popped as soon as it was blown up.
She once carved a jack-o-lantern out of a turnip.
She has 3 pairs of shoes at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
While she was in graduate school at Harvard, she and her female classmates were expected to serve tea and cookies to their male counterparts in the middle of a 2 hour seminar.
Atwood is the author of The CanLit Foodbook: From Pen to Palate: a Collection of Tasty Literary Fare. All illustrations in it are done by her.
The Testaments, the sequel to A Handmaid’s Tale, co-won the Booker Prize in 2019. Ms. Atwood is the oldest ever recipient of the award. The Testaments also broke Canadian sales records when it was published. It sold more print copies in the first week than any other Canadian book since BookNet Canada began to track sales data in 2005 and was the #1 bestselling Canadian book of 2019. It was also the most borrowed library book in Canada in 2020.
She lends her voice to a post-apocalyptic fitness app called Zombies, Run!
Margaret Atwood was one the first to name and analyze ‘Canadian literature’ in such a way that it had meaning and became vital to the country. Yes, there was Canadian literature before Atwood, but as her critical study Survival identifies, many Canadian writers define themselves by relation to this book.
I’d read that Ms. Atwood had once gone one-on-one with Norman Mailer (1986 PEN conference) on gender issues, and he came out looking the worst for his effort.
Cosplaying, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the nerd practice of dressing up as your favourite character from a film, book, or video game. Ms Atwood has been cosplayed since before some of you were born. As a general rule, she appears in such pictures as herself, though she has posted a picture of herself in her very first cosplay which took place in 1953. In it, she wears a hot dog outfit, with a mustard pot for a hat.
I applaud Margaret Atwood for her wicked sense of humour. her casual humility, her passionate environmentalism, the solid truth that she remains a force to be reckoned with, and because she will take risks that most of us can’t or won’t take. Brava, and thank you, Ms. Atwood.
Photo credit:
Jean Malek; Margaret Atwood (2015)
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