Canadian Cultural Icon Night -- Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is certainly a Canadian Cultural Icon. She’s been publishing since the early 1960’s – she has a terrific volume of much-honoured public work. When I was in high school in the early 1970’s, we read Surfacing. When I was in college we read Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and The Edible Woman. Lady Oracle is still one of my favourites, and my sister has every Atwood novel, first edition, hard cover, usually autographed. I’ve been reading poetry this year, and I have Morning in the Burned House and The Door on my bedside table right now.

This is a list, from Wikipedia, of her published novels and books of poetry – there are short stories, anthologies, children’s books and non-fiction also listed.

Novels

• The Edible Woman (1969)
• Surfacing (1972)
• Lady Oracle (1976)
• Life Before Man (1979) - finalist for the 1979 Governor General's Award
• Bodily Harm (1981)
• The Handmaid's Tale (1985) - winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1985 Governor General's Award.
• Cat's Eye (1988) - finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award
• The Robber Bride (1993) - finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award
• Alias Grace (1996) - winner of the 1996 Giller Prize and finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Award
• The Blind Assassin (2000) - winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and finalist for the 2000 Governor General's Award
• Oryx and Crake (2003) - finalist for the 2003 Governor General's Award
• The Penelopiad (2005) - longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award
• God's Gardeners

Poetry collections

• Double Persephone (1961)
• The Circle Game (1964) - winner of the 1966 Governor General's Award
• Expeditions (1965)
• Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966)
• The Animals in That Country (1968)
• The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
• Procedures for Underground (1970)
• Power Politics (1971)
• You Are Happy (1974)
• Selected Poems (1976)
• Two-Headed Poems (1978)
• True Stories (1981)
• Love songs of a Terminator (1983)
• Interlunar (1984)
• Morning in the Burned House (1996)
• "The Moment" from Morning in Burned House, online at CBC Words at Large
• Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965-1995 (1998)
• The Door (2007)

She’s an activist – a feminist and environmentalist. I tried to find a link to her reading some of her own work – but I found this video instead, and I like it.