Siren Song (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of three children in a two-parent household. Most of her early years were spent in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father pursued entomological research. In 1946, the family moved to Toronto, but during the summer, the parents continued taking their children to the woods. The experience prepared Atwood for her usual teenage employment at summer camps and provided the background for one of her more celebrated novels, Surfacing (1972), and also for much of the material in her poetry. Aside from what she humorously refers to as her “dark period” between the ages of eight and sixteen (when she had ambitions to paint or design clothes), Atwood has focused on writing, beginning her career as a poet, short story writer, cartoonist, and reviewer in her high school paper, and then later contributing to the ActaVictoriana and The Strand at Victoria College, University of Toronto. During her undergraduate years at Victoria College, Atwood met well-known critic Northrop Frye. In 1962, she took her A.M. at Radcliffe College and then attended Harvard University from 1962 to 1963. After returning to Toronto in 1963, Atwood took a job in a marketing research firm, which furnished her with material for part of her novel The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood then moved to Vancouver in 1964 and taught English at the University of British Columbia for one year. From 1965 to 1967, Atwood was back at Harvard, but she did not complete her Ph.D. by the time she left. In 1974, at the time of the publication of “Siren Song” in the volume You Are Happy, Atwood was living in Alliston, Ontario, located near Toronto. Some of the places Atwood has taught since leaving Harvard are Sir George Williams University, Montreal; the University of Alberta, Edmonton; York University, Toronto; The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; New York University in New York City; and Macquarie University in Australia. Among Atwood’s numerous awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, Humanist of the Year, Canadian Authors’ Association Novel of the Year for The Robber Bride (1993), and the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit. In addition, Atwood has many honorary degrees, the most prestigious from Oxford University. Atwood has penned over forty books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and she has written for radio, television, and film.

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