Atwood, the granny who weaved sci-fi

Nabila Habib Margaret Atwood’s face looks more like one belonging to a very socially active granny rather than to a writer of disturbing science fiction. And hers is not at all the face of an inventor (she invented LongPen)! At seventy, her smile is captivating and her writings more mesmeric.The young writer Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master`s degree from Radcliffe College. Though she started proper schooling only after she turned 11, she had discovered her passion for books quite early. She started writing when she was six, and in ten years since her first poem, she was sure of her career as a writer. The opinionated enthusiast A big ‘conservative’ enthusiast, Atwood is a conservative ‘Red Tory’, as well as a champion of cause for conservation of rare-birds. This last trait of environment-love she inherited from her entomologist father. An opinionated woman in a pleasant way, she is a versatile personality with her strong opinions defining her role as an author, feminist, a critic, poet and a social campaigner. Even though she has been lauded for her science fiction writings, her work fathoms deeper and heavier secrets than the futuristic issues raised by the genre. She has a very well defined opinion about her writings as well. She personally prefers to call her writings ‘speculative fiction’ rather than sci-fi, as she says, “science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can`t yet do.... speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth.” The feminist novelist Though she has published 17 poetry collections, six children’s books, eight non-fiction works, 10 short story collections besides penning three televised scripts, her fame rests more on her 13 novels. She has simply written so much! In her novels she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. Atwood`s fiction is often symbolic. She has moved easily between satire and fantasy, and enlarged the boundaries of traditional realism. Her work is often gothic, which is one reason for its wide popularity. She is frequently called one of the best comtemporary women writers; and for some, she is just the best. The Canadian Introducer Her critical work on Canadian writing, ‘Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature’, is considered the standard introduction to Canadian Literature in academics across the globe. Besides becoming a part of curriculum on Canadian studies, her critique has also helped theorise the Canadian identity before the world. The peripatetic thinker Another striking feature of her life is her constant shifts all over the world. Till date, the 70-year-old author has shifted base 23 times. This includes fourteen cities in six countries. But she kept on returning to Toronto, and currently resides in the city she has returned to for the sixth time. Her partiality for Toronto is also visible in her works, much of which is based there.