Female writer: Margaret Atwood (1939-)

WHO IS SHE?

Margaret Atwood (Canada, 1939) is a Canadian writer, poetess, literary critic, teacher and politic activist. She takes part in Amnesty International  and presides BirdLife International. She started to write at 16 and she is a graduate in English Philology. She is a feminist writer and a lot of her books has women protagonists besides, she talks about gender, language, religion and climate change. She also was a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers’ Trust of Canada.

WHAT HAS SHE WRITTEN?

She had written a wide range and huge amount of works, maybe her most famous novel is The handmaid’s tale, novel that HBO adapted into a tv series, and Alias Grace, that Netflix adapted into a tv miniseries. (Both of them highly recommended, although HBO it’s not so true to the book).

She has written a trilogy, some short writing collections, lots of poetry collections (the most famous is Double Persephone, that made her won the E. J. Pratt medal), 4 e-books, she has edited 5 anthologies, several books for children, some essays, two paintings, three scripts for tv, three opera libretti, 4 audio recordings, one graphic novel, she took part in the tv series ‘Wandering Wenda’, where she played herself and 14 books, which I have listed here:

-The edible woman (1969)

-Surfacing (1972)

-Lady Oracle (1976)

-Life before man (1979)

-Bodily harm (1981)

-The handmaid’s tale (1985)

-Cat’s eye (1988)

-The robber bride (1993)

-Alias Grace (1996)

-The blind assassin (2000)

-The Penelopiad (2005)

-Scribbler moon (2014)

-The heart goes last (2015)

-Hag-Seed (2016)

WHAT HAS SHE SAID?

‘What I would like is to defend the dignity of the people, and I have that radical idea that women are people”.

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly”.

WHY SHOULD WE NOT FORGET HER AND HER WORK?

Margaret Atwood is one of the best writers of this age, we are lucky that she is alive and we can enjoy new works every few time (although that she give classes about writing in some universities). Usually, people don’t read more than The handmaid’s tale, although she as more books and it is not fair to judge her based on just one book. That book had made a lot of people to question the women’s role in society. It is a dystopian novel but it is not so ridiculous that women are just used to procreate or breed, isn’t it? (It’s just an irony)
I think that Margaret is a writer that everybody should read, and not only stay in the surface and read The handmaid’s tale, but more, because Margaret has a lot to teach and show us.