DELIGHTFUL SATURDAYS WITH MY FAVORITE AUTHORS AND POETs (69)

MARGARET ATWOOD

( IMAGE WITH INFO: WIKIPEDIA)

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is one of the most popular figures in English literature. Besides being a Canadian poet, she is also famous as a novelist, a literary critic, an essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Wow! She reminds me of Leonardo Da Vinci who was everything, a human could imagine to be. Her literary career comprises of 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, and two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction since 1961. This is such a remarkable achievement.

She was born as Margaret Eleanor Atwood on November 18, 1939 (age 83) at Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her parents were Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia. Atwood spent a large portion of her childhood in the wilderness of northern Quebec and travelled frequently between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto due to her father’s study in forest entomology.

She was enrolled in a regular school only after she was 12. Further, she joined Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto to graduate in 1957. Atwood’s keen interest in writing blossomed when she was only 6 and started writing plays and poems. Her love for reading flourished as she began to read the books on literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She also took part in the Girl Guides of Canada’s Brownie programme as a young child. In a number of her publications, Atwood has written about her experiences as a Girl Guide.

Atwood decided at age 16 that she wanted to pursue a career as a writer. She went to Victoria College in the University of Toronto in 1957 and successfully completed Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French. When she was in the said college, she started publishing poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal, and took part in the sophomore theatrical tradition of The Bob Comedy Revue. Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye were some of her professors.

With a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, Atwood  started graduate study at Radcliffe College  at Harvard University in 1961.After  graduating from Radcliffe with an MA  in 1962, she continued doctoral studies for  two years but did not complete her  dissertation,  The English Metaphysical  Romance.

Atwood’s sister, Ruth,was born in 1951 and has a brother, Harold Leslie Atwood, older than her by two years. Atwood got married to Jim Polk, an American Writer, in 1968 and divorced in 1973. Fellow novelist, Graeme Gibson, entered her life and they settled in Alliston, Ontario. They were blessed with a daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, in 1976. Atwood and Gibson lived together until September 18, 2019 when Gibson died of dementia. She gave a tribute to Gibson in the form of a poem, Dearly, and an essay on grief and poetry which appeared in The Guardian in 2020.

Margaret Atwood is an inspiration to all the women writers. I had read her most popular book ” The Handmaid’s Tale” . I loved it so much. May she continue to rule the hearts of billions of her admirers.

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Best published works.

Can’t wait to read the rest of her books.

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