Genres: Romance, Historical fiction, Speculative fiction, Dystopian fiction
Notable work(s): The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, Surfacing
Influences: William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, John Buchan, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Alice Munro
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author, novelist, poet, critic, essayist, feminist and activist. She is one of the most widely read, critically appraised, prolific writers of recent times.
Atwood started writing at the age of 6 and by 16 had decided to pursue writing as a full-time profession. She self-published her first book of poems, Double Persephone, in 1961 which won the E.J Pratt Medal. This was followed by a book of poetry, The Circle Game (1964), which received the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry (Canada).
Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was about a woman who cannot eat and who feels that she is being eaten. This was published in 1969, and was pivotal in establishing Atwood as one of the major contributors to the world of fiction writers of that time. Through this book Atwood explores gender stereotypes and the dynamics of relationships one has with the self and others. From this book onwards, all of her novels have had female protagonists with enigmatic personalities, displaying a markedly different disposition towards events and people.
She then came out with Surfacing (1973), which deals with a woman's investigation into her father's disappearance; Lady Oracle (1977); Life Before Man (1980); Bodily Harm (1982), the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist recuperating on a Caribbean island; and The Handmaid's Tale (1986), a futuristic novel describing a woman's struggle to break free from her role. This novel has been the most famous work of hers, garnering many awards, fans and a new lot of converted followers. It received the very first Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year, in 1987. It was nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science fiction awards. It received a nomination for the Man Booker Awards too and was converted into a Hollywood movie.
Her latest novels have been: Cat's Eye (1989), dealing with the subject of bullying among young girls; The Robber Bride (1993); Alias Grace (1996), the tale of a woman who is convicted for her involvement in two murders about which she claims to have no memory; The Blind Assassin (2000), a multi-layered family memoir; and Oryx and Crake (2003), a vision of a scientific dystopia, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Atwood has been nominated for the Booker five times, winning it in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.
There are few female writers who have made such an impact in the contemporary fiction world and Atwood, with her incisive portrayal of the human psyche, dry wit and a style of narrative that produces uncertain and open ended climaxes in her stories, certainly is a pioneer in the field. She has created storylines within stories, protagonists peeping into their own lives through their own imagined characters, thus creating a mirror or rather a prism made of mirrors which reflect, refract, divert and engross the reader in the intricate lives of her subjects. Atwood brings in many elements of science fiction into her works, but chooses to call them “speculative fiction” because she believes that those things can happen and are already within the grasp of mankind to make it possible. Her works go back and forth into history and the future, making the reader believe that he’s travelling in time with the characters.
When she started her literary career, the feminist movement had started spreading its wings, and Atwood, in her writings has shown all of her heroines being depicted in a certain way. Her protagonists are strong and weak at the same time, struggling between passion and reason, there’s a coming of age – a moment of realization and breaking moulds- for every heroine.
Atwood was a professor of English and her love for the language and subsequent mastery over the same is evident in her beautifully constructed sentences. Be it her poems or novels, she has certain recurring elements in her work that have helped to make a distinct identity for her style of writing.
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