Margaret Atwood

 Happy 84th birthday to esteemed Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood! She is pictured here attempting to burn an 'unburnable' copy of her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" with a flamethrower. A single unburnable copy was created last year to raise awareness about increasing censorship; her dystopian science fiction novel, which centers around one woman's quest for freedom in a totalitarian theocracy where women's rights are completely suppressed, has been the subject of numerous censorship challenges since its publication in 1985. The unburnable copy was auctioned off after Atwood's flamethrowing attempt, raising $130,000 for PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization. As Atwood famously asserted in her poem "Spelling": "A word after a word after a word is power."

Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1939, Atwood is the author of 15 books of poetry and numerous novels, including Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, The Edible Woman, and Oryx and Crake. She won the Booker Prize -- which honors the best original novel published that year -- for "The Blind Assassin" in 2000 and has been shortlisted several additional times. She has also won two Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. This year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Atwood as a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy.

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Today is the birthday of Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood (1939), best known for her searing explorations of feminism, sexuality, and politics in books like The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), a dystopian novel that takes place in a United States, which has become a fundamentalist theocracy where women are forced to have children. She started writing the book on a battered, rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin. The book became an international best-seller. Atwood’s daughter was nine when it was published; by the time she was in high school, The Handmaid’s Tale was required reading. Atwood once said, “Men often ask me, ‘Why are your female characters so paranoid?’ It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”

Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. Her father was an entomologist and the family lived for a long time in insect-research stations in the wilderness. She was 11 before she attended a full year of school. About growing up in near isolation, Atwood said: “There were no films or theatres in the North, and the radio didn’t work very well. But there were always books. I learned to read early, was an avid reader and read everything I could get my hands on — no one ever told me I couldn’t read a book. My mother liked quietness in children, and a child who is reading is very quiet.”

One day she was walking across a football field on her way home and began writing a poem in her head and decided to write it down. She says: “After that, writing was the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know that this poem of mine wasn’t at all good, and if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have cared.”

Her first novel was The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten. Atwood likes to write in longhand, preferably with a Rollerball pen, and is even the co-inventor of the LongPen, a remote signing device that allows a person to write in ink anywhere in the world using a tablet and the internet. Her books include Alias Grace (1996), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Heart Goes Last (2015).

About the writing life, Margaret Atwood says: “You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” #TheWritersAlmanac