Fact File and Significant Characteristics

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s first novel The Edible Woman appeared late in 1969, and during 1970 readers in Canada, the United States and Britain were beginning to ask, ‘Margaret who?’ Atwood was known if at all as a young poet who had won an important Canadian literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, for The Circle Game in 1966. By 1985, when The Handmaid’s Tale appeared, the reviewer in the London Review of Books could claim that Margaret Atwood was ‘the most distinguished novelist under fifty currently writing in English’,1 and now twenty five years on from The Edible Woman she is an international literary celebrity whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and published in twenty-five countries. A versatile and prolific writer, Atwood has produced eight novels, ten books of poetry, three short story collections, in addition to an important book of literary criticism and numerous essays and reviews. She has also written two children’s books, compiled and illustrated The Can Lit Food Book, and is the editor of the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and co-editor of the Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. She has not, however, written a biography or an autobiography, and as she said in an interview, deliberately distancing her private self from her public image, ‘Don’t know that I ever will.’2