Margaret Atwood is Canada’s best-known writer and one of the most highly acclaimed living writers world-wide. Her work has achieved both extremely high sales and international critical respect, culminating with her Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000. She was born in 1939 in Ottawa and as a child she spent much time travelling. Her parents were from Nova Scotia, but they left during the Depression, and Carl Atwood became a professor of zoology, based in Ottawa, and later Toronto. He ran a research station studying tree-eating insects and during the warmer months he took his family to a bush cabin in a remote part of Quebec. During these months Margaret and her brother were taught by their mother, since they could not atten

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First published 07 July 2001

Citation: Hammill, Faye. "Margaret Atwood". The Literary Encyclopedia. 7 July 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=175, accessed 20 November 2009.]