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Born in 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Margaret Atwood spent time during her childhood in Canada’s wilderness and didn’t begin formal full-time schooling till she was eleven. She earned degrees at the University of Toronto and Radcliffe (part of Harvard) and began publishing poetry while a graduate student. Writing, teaching, and advocating for Canadian culture, feminist issues, and the environment have been intertwined passions of Atwood’s life, and she is now an internationally known and highly respected creative talent who works across genres and media and collaborates to produce film versions of her works.
Narrative exploration and innovation have been key to Atwood’s long and varied career. The metafictional approach she takes in “Happy Endings” is one brief example of the open-minded and sometimes experimental approach to narrative that characterizes her writing. In the story, variations interweave, characters appear in overlapping plotlines, and a wry narrator comments about the paradox of fiction: so much is the same, one thing after another happens in a repetitious way, and the fate of characters is predetermined. Yet writers keep producing stories and readers keep consuming them.
In some works, Atwood explores how historical documents can be integrated into fiction in ways that both inform storylines and provoke questions about how history is written and who writes it. In other works, she incorporates mythology or Shakespearean drama into new stories, retelling and examining the older sources through current political and cultural lenses.
Perhaps her most widely-known novel is The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The work has been adapted as a movie, a television series, and even an opera and a ballet. This dystopian novel takes the form of a manuscript based on recordings found after the story’s main action has receded into history. Pieced together and recontextualized, the writer’s story is then studied as a historical text, which is itself a fictional creation. Tracing the novel through its various adaptations—for example as a story told in dance rather than words—suggests the complex interlocking forms that fiction can take when not constrained by traditional literary plot structures. “Happy Endings” offers a glimpse into how writers might decide to think about plot, character, and theme, while longer works such as The Handmaid’s Tale have space to explore these considerations more fully.
Atwood also writes nonfiction, including essays based on lectures she has given as a teacher and others that treat pressing societal issues. She is a sought-after speaker on political, cultural, and environmental issues and has also produced graphic art and children’s books. She continues to write and to teach as well, offering an online masterclass and sharing advice and resources at her website.
