Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood: The Novelist Who Invented Nothing

She has a rule, and she has kept it for decades: nothing goes into the book that has not already happened somewhere. The forced births, the confiscated bank accounts, the public executions strung along a wall in *The Handmaid's Tale* each had a precedent in the historical record before Atwood typed it. "It's not that I imagine them," she has said of the futures she writes, "it's that I notice that people are working on them and I take it a few steps further down the road." It is the least fanciful method imaginable, and it produced the most quoted dystopia of the last half-century.

A Childhood Without a Classroom

Atwood's early life was organised around insects. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was a forest entomologist whose research took the family into the northern Quebec backwoods for long stretches; her mother, Margaret Dorothy Killam, a dietitian from Woodville, Nova Scotia, went with them. The result was a childhood spent shuttling between Ottawa, where she was born on 18 November 1939, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto, with the bush in between. She was the middle of three children, with a brother, Harold Leslie, two years ahead of her and a sister, Ruth, born in 1951. She did not attend school full-time until she was twelve. What she had instead was time, weather and reading, an unusual apprenticeship for a writer who would spend a career describing what happens when institutions fail and people are returned to the land.

Frye's Student

She took an honours BA in English at the University of Toronto in 1961, with minors in philosophy and French, studying under the poet Jay Macpherson and the critic Northrop Frye. Frye's presence matters: his systematic reading of myth and archetype runs visibly through Atwood's habit of building novels on inherited story-shapes and then turning them inside out. She went on to Radcliffe College at Harvard for an MA in 1962 and spent two further years on doctoral work. The dissertation, on "The English Metaphysical Romance," was never finished. It is one of the more productive incompletions in Canadian letters.

Poet First

The novels came later. Atwood began as a poet and has never stopped, publishing eighteen books of poetry since 1961, when *Double Persephone* appeared. *The Circle Game* (1966) won her the first of two Governor General's Awards. Then came *The Animals in That Country* (1968), *The Journals of Susanna Moodie* (1970), *Procedures for Underground* (1970), *Power Politics* (1971), *You Are Happy* (1974), *Selected Poems 1965-1975* (1976), *Two-Headed Poems* (1978) and, much later, *Dearly* (2020). The poems explain the prose. Atwood's sentences are compressed and load-bearing in a way that novelists who began as novelists rarely manage; she learned early that a line has to survive being read aloud.

The Novels

Her fiction began with *The Edible Woman* (1969) and *Surfacing* (1972), followed by *Lady Oracle* (1976), *Life Before Man* (1979) and *Bodily Harm* (1981). Then, in 1985, *The Handmaid's Tale*, which took a second Governor General's Award and, in 1987, the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award. *Cat's Eye* (1988) and *The Robber Bride* (1993) followed; *Alias Grace* (1996) won the Giller Prize; *The Blind Assassin* (2000) took both the Booker Prize and the Hammett Prize. The MaddAddam trilogy, *Oryx and Crake* (2003), *The Year of the Flood* (2009) and *MaddAddam* (2013), extended her speculative work into biotechnology and collapse. *Hag-Seed* (2016) reworked *The Tempest*. *The Testaments* (2019) returned to Gilead thirty-four years on and won her a second Booker.

Her other honours include the Order of Ontario (1990), the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2008), the PEN Pinter Prize (2016) and the Franz Kafka Prize (2017). She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1981.

The Inventor

In 2004, exhausted by a signing tour for *Oryx and Crake*, Atwood did something novelists do not usually do: she designed a machine. The LongPen let an author sign a book remotely, transmitting handwriting over the internet to a robotic arm holding a real pen. She founded Unotchit Inc. to build it; the company became Syngrafii Inc. in 2013, and as of May 2021 she remained a director and a patent holder. The device is a small but genuine data point about how her mind works, seeing a logistical annoyance as an engineering problem rather than an occupational hazard.

The Public Argument

Atwood has spent as much energy on literary infrastructure as on her own books. She co-founded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada, chaired the Writers' Union of Canada and helped establish the Canadian chapter of PEN International. With her partner Graeme Gibson she served as honorary president of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. She opposed the 1987 Canada-United States free trade agreement, signed a 2018 appeal for the imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, added her name to the July 2020 "Harper's Letter" on open debate, and in 2025 signed a letter calling for the release of the Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

She has also drawn real anger. In 2016 she signed the UBC Accountable letter demanding an independent investigation into the University of British Columbia's dismissal of the novelist Steven Galloway over sexual harassment allegations. Atwood maintained her signature endorsed due process rather than the accused; many readers, in the middle of the #MeToo reckoning, did not accept the distinction. *Maclean's* had called her "Canada's most gossiped-about writer" as far back as 1976, and she has never entirely lost the title.

Why Margaret Is Called a Genius

The honest starting point is that the sources do not record any major critic or institution formally pinning the word to her. Atwood has no MacArthur "genius grant." What she has is an unusual and demonstrable cognitive habit: extrapolation under strict evidentiary discipline. Her own account of the method, that she takes things already in process and moves them a few steps down the road, describes something closer to systems analysis than to inspiration. It requires holding a large body of historical precedent in mind, identifying which present-day arrangements are structurally unstable, and projecting the failure accurately enough that readers recognise it decades later. *The Handmaid's Tale* has passed that test since 1985.

The range strengthens the case. Very few writers work at a high level in poetry, realist fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction and criticism simultaneously, and fewer still design a functioning piece of hardware on the side. Two Booker Prizes thirty-four years apart is a rare marker of sustained, not lucky, ability.

The counter-case is fair. Awards measure books, not minds, and her later work has been criticised as more schematic than her best. The UBC episode showed that formidable analytical clarity does not guarantee political judgement, and some readers found her reasoning there legalistic. Her originality lies in arrangement and pattern-recognition rather than in invention, which is precisely what she claims. Calling that genius is defensible; calling it prophecy is not, and she would be the first to say so.

Legacy

Gilead has outgrown its author. The red cloak and white bonnet now appear at legislative protests in countries Atwood has never lived in, which is an odd fate for a book assembled from footnotes. Her deeper legacy may be structural: the prizes she founded, the writers' organisations she built, and a body of work that made speculative fiction respectable in literary Canada. She writes, still, about what is already underway.

Achievements

• Companion of the Order of Canada — 1981
• Order of Ontario — 1990
• Princess of Asturias Literary Prize — 2008
• Harvard Centennial Medal — 1990
• Notable work: The Handmaid's Tale
• Notable work: Cat's Eye
• Notable work: Alias Grace
• Notable work: The Blind Assassin
• Genres: historical fiction, speculative fiction and science fiction