Margaret Atwood (1939- ), Canadian novelist and poet, is popular with readers and critics alike, and is acclaimed internationally for the literary merit of her books. While first recognised as a poet, she is better known now as a writer of novels, often with feminist themes, such as The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Much of her work addresses the theme of victimisation and how characters react to victimhood; it also sets out to explore Canada, its wilderness, and the way it was conquered and settled. Explaining her motivation as a writer, Atwood told Sybil Steinberg (Publishers Weekly, 24 July 2000), 'I think that writers don't write because they know everything. They write because they don't know everything. [. . .] Writing is like life in that you don't know where you are until you look back.'

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, the daughter of Carl Edmund Atwood and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. Her father was a forest entomologist, and Atwood and her brother and sister spent part of every year until 1945 in the Canadian wilderness while their father conducted research. There Atwood developed her imagination as well as a respect for nature. After 1946 she was raised in Toronto, where she wrote for the school newspaper at Leaside High School.

When Atwood entered the University of Toronto in 1957, she continued her literary activities. At the time the school was a centre for Canadian poetry, and Atwood was influenced there by the Canadian poet Jay Macpherson. She earned a BA in 1961 and then entered Radcliffe College, where she was granted an MA in 1962. Atwood continued her graduate work at Harvard University from 1962 to 1963 and again from 1965 to 1967, although she did not complete her doctorate. In 1963 she returned to Canada, where she worked at a market research firm. From 1964 to 1965 she taught English literature at the University of British Columbia. Atwood later taught at Sir George Williams University (1967-8) and York University (1971-2).

While Atwood was focusing on education, she published her first poetry collections, setting the tone for the rest of her published work. Double Persephone (1961), which won the 1961 E.J. Pratt Medal, contrasts the mutability of life and nature with the immutability of man's artificial creations. Atwood followed this with The Circle Game (1964), a novel which further explores this duality, which won the 1966 Governor General's Award. Nature is depicted as unstable and is distinguished from such human constructs as love, literature and games. Human constructs shelter but trap, while nature is liberating but dangerous. Alienation also soon emerged as a significant theme in Atwood's poetic work. In The Animals in That Country (1968), she examines the Canadian landscape and also looks at the problems of country and exile. Living in exile is at the centre of the fictionalised poetic journal The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems (1970), which is based on the experiences of a real nineteenth-century British settler in Canada. Atwood returned to comparing and contrasting the animal and human worlds in the collection Procedures for Underground (1970).

In the late 1960s Atwood began publishing the novels that established her reputation and gained her a wider audience. Many of her novels feature feminist themes and strong female characters who are searching for their identities, including her debut The Edible Woman (1969). The story focuses on Marian McAlpin, who is engaged to be married but is anxious about the prospect of embracing the traditional role of a wife. As she realises her anxiety about marriage, her body rejects food. While The Edible Woman received mixed reviews, many critics acknowledged the novel's comic and social value.

As she gradually transferred her professional focus to writing, Atwood became an editor and a member of the board of directors at the House of Anasi Press between 1971 and 1973. She was also a writer in residence at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1973. During this period, Atwood published more works of significance, including Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974), poetry collections about humans dealing with difficult romantic entanglements. Atwood also wrote two significant novels about relationships: Surfacing (1972), a ghost story set primarily in the Canadian wilderness, which secured Atwood's reputation as an important Canadian novelist; and the more comic five-part novel Lady Oracle (1976), which focuses on the troubled life of Joan Foster, a woman who leads a double life as an incompetent housewife and a feminist poet.

Along with several poetry collections -- Two-Headed Poems (1978), about freedom and the limits of language; True Stories (1981), about the political conscience and language; and Interlunar (1984), about the political and moral values of storytelling -- Atwood continued to produce challenging novels. In Life Before Man (1979) she explores the theme of extinction through a love triangle involving three emotionally detached characters, two of whom work at a natural history museum. Atwood draws a comparison between the sterility of the characters' lives and the fossils and dinosaur bones with which the women work. Critics embraced the book more enthusiastically than they did The Edible Woman, noting Atwood's deep introspection, ability to delineate character, and continued emphasis on the search for identity in her characters.

Many of the concepts of Life Before Man resurface in Atwood's next novel, Bodily Harm (1981). The protagonist, Rennie Wilford, a Toronto magazine journalist, is also emotionally superficial for much of the story. In her career, Wilford has focused on writing about facile topics, but she finds meaning and purpose in her life after a partial mastectomy, the end of a relationship, and an arrest on a Caribbean island where she observes political violence. Many critics viewed Bodily Harm as a critique of the detective novel, while continuing to note Atwood's focus on women's concerns.

Atwood found perhaps her greatest commercial success with her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Often compared to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Atwood's book puts feminist concerns at the forefront as the author looks at a future United States, Gilead, which has been taken over in a coup by fundamentalist Christians. Under a Christian male dictatorship, the world becomes polluted, and female fertility is at a crisis-level low. The women who still can have children are forced to become the breeders for the rest of society, while many infertile women are enslaved. For inspiration, Atwood had drawn on various repressive laws and public statements targeting women worldwide. While some critics took exception to the details of Atwood's future world, in particular its fundamentalist Christian dictatorship, many lauded The Handmaid's Tale as a well-written thriller and an insightful political statement. The novel won several awards, including the Governor General's Award in 1986.

Women's relationships and friendships are at the centre of Atwood's next few novels. Cat's Eye (1989) was honoured, among other awards, with the 1989 Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award. The work is an autobiography of a 50-year-old artist, Elaine Risley, emphasising her relationships with the women in her family and her female friends in childhood. In contrast, Atwood's next novel The Robber Bride (1993) focuses on relationships between more mature women. Inspired by the fairy tale 'The Robber Bridegroom', the book follows the paths of four women from college to middle age. Three of the women have been friends for years, while the fourth has betrayed each of them since their college days. Critics lauded the humour in the book as well as Atwood's depiction of the femme fatale Zenia, which underscored the existence of female predators.

Returning to poetry for the first time in nearly a decade with Morning in the Burned House (1995), Atwood explored themes very different to those in her novels during this phase of her career. The collection's theme is grief and loss, perhaps related to the death of Atwood's father, as well as a growing interest in her own mortality. However, grief is a duality for Atwood, and her poems on the subject also convey a sense of freedom and liberation.

With her next novel, Alias Grace (1996), Atwood produced her first work of historical fiction. It is based on the true story of Grace Marks, whose life the author first explored in The Servant Girl (1974), a television script for the Canadian Broadcasting Centre. In northern Canada in 1843, Marks, a servant, is found guilty of murdering her employer and his mistress. Some people doubt her guilt as she serves out a life sentence in prison for the crime. Marks has no memory of the murders, but those supporting clemency ask Simon Jordan, a young practitioner of the new medical science of psychiatry, to examine her. Jordan does not know what to believe when he hears about Marks's hard life and the flashbacks of the murders that haunt her. While some critics thought the historical details overwhelmed the narrative, the character of Marks and her story were generally acknowledged to be compelling.

Atwood won the 2000 Booker Prize and the 2001 Dashiell Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers for The Blind Assassin (2000), a gothic novel that also has tragedy at its centre. This fictional memoir of the aged Iris Chasen explores the way in which her life was marred by the deaths of her sister, husband and daughter. Critics found the novel absorbing and powerful.

Atwood's next novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), returns to the themes of The Handmaid's Tale in another dystopia, though one without overt feminist concerns. After a global catastrophe, only a man named Snowman survives amongst bio-engineered animals. Critics praised this science fiction work for its powerful and indicting view of the future. Atwood followed Oryx and Crake with her first volume of original poems in more than a decade, The Door (2007), which examines the disorderliness of love.

In addition to other collections of poetry and novels, Atwood has also published a number of short-story collections, books for children, radio plays, television plays, essays, and critical works. Among her acclaimed short-story collections are Wilderness Tips and Other Stories (1991), ten well-constructed narratives; Good Bones (1992; revised edition published as Good Bones and Simple Murders, 1994), which features poetry-inspired prose pieces, fairy tales, monologues and fables; and Moral Disorder (2006), an interconnected exploration of a Canadian woman's life through her family, friends and acquaintances. Much of Atwood's work for children is quirky and light, and includes Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003) and the Cinderella-inspired Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004).

Atwood's one important book of criticism is Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). In this work Atwood delineates a specific Canadian literature that is distinct from the literature of both the United Kingdom and the United States, and she argues that Canadian literature focuses on victims, victimisation, and the ability of victims to survive. As critics noted, her own work fits this pattern, and some claimed that she had included in her survey only those works that supported her preconceived notion. Unquestionably she has greatly supported Canadian nationalism over the course of her career. Atwood has also written a number of books about writing, including Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004 (2004) and Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 1970-2005 (2005).

By the 1980s Atwood was able to devote the majority of her time to writing. She was a writer in residence several times, including stints at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in 1985, and Australia's Macquarie University in 1987. She was also a visiting professor at New York University in 1986. In addition, she headed significant writers' groups for periods in the 1980s, including the Writers' Union of Canada and PEN Canada. Atwood won numerous awards over the course of her career, including the Union Prize for Poetry (1969), the Radcliffe Medal (1980), the Harvard University Centennial Medal (1990), Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1994), and the Enlightenment Award from the Edinburgh International Book Festival (2005). By the early 1990s Atwood was making her home primarily in Toronto, where she continued to live and write in the early 2000s.

Early in Atwood's career, critics saw her poetry as significant, but for many readers the scope and popularity of her novels have overshadowed the power of her poetry. Critically acclaimed in the United States, Canada and beyond, her work has been translated into many languages. The depth and breadth of thematic concern in both her poetry and her fiction have impressed critics and readers for years, though most of her work ultimately focuses on women and feminist concerns. Many critics regard Atwood as a feminist writer whose stories highlight the negative impact on women of repressive ideologies and suppressive mythologies.

Critics note that Atwood has used symbolism, irony, a self-conscious narrative voice, and many different genres to examine the human condition as well as to offer a critique of the social structures that can overwhelm the individual. Definition of self, victimisation, and the Canadian experience are common threads in her work, often explored with sensitivity and humour. She regularly examines how unequal power relations negatively affect the lives of her primarily female protagonists and influence how they define themselves. Reviewers have praised her for recognising that men and women can be both victims and victimisers, and that it is people's responsibility to be neither. Many of her stories also focus on the choice women have to either refuse or assent to be a victim.

Atwood is also often seen as the ideal Canadian writer, because she regularly takes a point of view that is informed by her Canadian background. She also focuses on Canadian concerns, such as the conquering of the Canadian wilderness and the imperialist overtaking of Canada. Though various critics have categorised Atwood as a Canadian nationalist and a feminist, and have even called some of her fictional works gothic, she is also lauded for incorporating and transcending such labels, looking at life with both a scientific observational curiosity and a sense of human empathy. Indeed, her fiction as a whole is seen as reflecting the inequities of the modern world.

There are numerous critical evaluations of Atwood and her works. Such collections as The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism (1981), edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, and Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (2000), edited by Reingard M. Nischik, offer a broad spectrum of critical analysis. Critiques of Atwood's literary style and language can be found in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System (1993), edited by Sherrill Grace and Lorraine Weir, and J. Brooks Bouson's Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood (1993). Specific major novels by Atwood are analysed in Carol L. Beran's Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man (1993) and Lee Briscoe Thompson's Scarlet Letters: Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1997).

Among the many critical biographies of Atwood is Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (2004), by Nathalie Cooke. Interviews with Atwood are included in Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990), edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, and Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood (2006), also edited by Ingersoll. Filmed conversations with Atwood can be seen in the documentary Margaret Atwood: Once in August (1984).