49 Facts About Margaret Atwood

1.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18,1939 and is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor.

2.

Margaret Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada.

3.

Margaret Atwood is a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto.

4.

Margaret Atwood is the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.

5.

Margaret Atwood did not attend school full-time until she was 12 years old.

6.

Margaret Atwood became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books.

7.

Margaret Atwood attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.

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8.

Margaret Atwood began writing plays and poems at the age of 6.

9.

Margaret Atwood has written about her experiences in Girl Guides in several of her publications.

10.

Margaret Atwood realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16.

11.

Margaret Atwood graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and minors in philosophy and French.

12.

In 1961, Margaret Atwood began graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.

13.

Margaret Atwood obtained a master's degree from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued doctoral studies for two years, but did not finish her dissertation, The English Metaphysical Romance.

14.

Margaret Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but divorced in 1973.

15.

Margaret Atwood formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976.

16.

Margaret Atwood wrote about Gibson in the poem Dearly and in an accompanying essay on grief and poetry published in The Guardian in 2020.

17.

Margaret Atwood published three novels during this time: Surfacing ; Lady Oracle ; and Life Before Man, which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.

18.

In 1977 Margaret Atwood published her first short story collection, Dancing Girls, which was the winner of the St Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction.

19.

Margaret Atwood had previously written the 1974 CBC made-for-TV film The Servant Girl, about the life of Grace Marks, the young servant who, along with James McDermott, was convicted of the crime.

20.

Margaret Atwood continued her poetry contributions by publishing Snake Woman in 1999 for the Women's Literature journal Kalliope.

21.

In 2000, Margaret Atwood published her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, to critical acclaim, winning both the Booker Prize and the Hammett Prize in 2000.

22.

In 2001, Margaret Atwood was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.

23.

Margaret Atwood followed this success with the publication of Oryx and Crake in 2003, the first novel in a series that includes The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, which would collectively come to be known as the MaddAddam Trilogy.

24.

In 2005, Margaret Atwood published the novella The Penelopiad as part of the Canongate Myth Series.

25.

In 2016, Margaret Atwood published the novel Hag-Seed, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare Series.

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26.

On November 28,2018, Margaret Atwood announced that she would publish The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, in September 2019.

27.

In 2008, Margaret Atwood published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a collection of five lectures delivered as part of the Massey Lectures from October 12 to November 1,2008.

28.

Pauline, composed by Tobin Stokes with libretto by Margaret Atwood, premiered on May 23,2014, at Vancouver's York Theatre.

29.

In 2016, Margaret Atwood began writing the superhero comic book series Angel Catbird, with co-creator and illustrator Johnnie Christmas.

30.

Margaret Atwood thinks that readers will probably need a paleo-anthropologist to translate some parts of her story.

31.

In early 2004, while on the paperback tour in Denver for her novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, what would later be known as the LongPen, that would enable a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet, thus allowing her to conduct her book tours without being physically present.

32.

In November 2020 Margaret Atwood published Dearly, a collection of poems exploring absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, and gifts and renewals.

33.

The central poem, Dearly, was published in The Guardian newspaper along with an essay exploring the passing of time, grief, and how a poem belongs to the reader; this is accompanied by an audio recording of Margaret Atwood reading the poem on the newspaper's website.

34.

In such works, Margaret Atwood explicitly explores the relation of history and narrative and the processes of creating history.

35.

Margaret Atwood has called Mona Awad, a Canadian novelist and short-story writer, her Literary Heir Apparent.

36.

Margaret Atwood's work has been of interest to feminist literary critics, despite Margaret Atwood's unwillingness at times to apply the label 'feminist' to her works.

37.

In 2018, following a partnership between Hulu's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale and women's rights organisation Equality Now, Margaret Atwood was honored at their 2018 Make Equality Reality Gala.

38.

In 2019, Margaret Atwood partnered with Equality Now for the release of The Testaments.

39.

In 2005, Margaret Atwood said that she does at times write social science fiction and that The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake can be designated as such.

40.

Margaret Atwood repeatedly makes observations about the relationship of humans to animals in her works.

41.

Margaret Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, and she and Graeme Gibson were the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International.

42.

Margaret Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.

43.

Margaret Atwood held the position of PEN Canada president in the mid 1980s and was the 2017 recipient of the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award.

44.

Margaret Atwood said that the 2016 United States presidential election led to an increase in sales of The Handmaid's Tale.

45.

On February 24,2022, Margaret Atwood briefly covered the war in Ukraine at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and published a link to the state aid fund on Twitter.

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46.

Margaret Atwood continues to publish information about the war in Ukraine on the social network.

47.

Margaret Atwood appears in a cameo in the first episode as one of the Aunts at the Red Center.

48.

Margaret Atwood makes a cameo in the fourth episode of the series as a disapproving churchgoer.

49.

Margaret Atwood holds numerous honorary degrees from various institutions, including The Sorbonne, NUI Galway as well as Oxford and Cambridge universities.