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Posted 05/05/04
Writer
(Honorary Degree: Doctor of Letters)
Margaret Atwood
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Biographical Background: Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her thirty years of writing, Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996). Her novel The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize. Her latest work of non fiction, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2002 and in April 2003, her eleventh novel, the Man Booker Prize-nominated Oryx and Crake was released to great acclaim. She has an uncanny knack for writing books that anticipate the popular preoccupations of her public.
Acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal and worldly problems of universal concern, Atwood's work has been published in more than thirty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.
Atwood currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
Return to 2004 Commencement press release
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