Notable figures

Arguably, the best-internationally-known living Canadian writer (especially after the recent passing of Canadian greats, Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley) is Margaret Atwood, a prolific novelist, poet, and literary critic. This group, along with Alice Munro, who has been called the best living writer of short stories in English, were the first to elevate Canadian Literature to the world stage. During the post-war decades only a handful of books of any literary merit were published each year in Canada, and Canadian literature was viewed as an appendage to British and American writing. Much of what was produced dealt with extremely typical Canadiana such as the outdoors and animals, or events in Canadian history. A reaction against this tradition, poet Leonard Cohen 's novel Beautiful Losers (1966), was labeled by one reviewer "the most revolting book ever written in Canada". Most of what Canadians read was written in the United States or Great Britain. Most of what was studied in Canadian schools and universities was also foreign.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian writer. A prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and political activist, she has received national and international recognition for her writing.

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Atwood was the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, a zoologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killiam, a former dietician and nutritionist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. She did not complete a full year of school until grade eight. She became a voracious reader of refined literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She went to Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto.

Atwood began writing at age sixteen. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.

In the fall of 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately-printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard, for two 2-year periods, but never took a degree. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg professor of English.

In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She married fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. She returned to Toronto in 1980.

She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.

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