Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSCis a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 November 1939
CityOttawa, Canada
CountryCanada
You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.
Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.
Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way.
I think of this as a democratizing device.
When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
. . . time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.
The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers - it's given them that extra push, and that extra dollop of confidence.