Margaret Atwood
Birthplace: Ottawa
Age : 70
Margaret Atwood first made her mark as a poet, most notably with The Circle Game, for which she earned her first Governor-General's Literary Award in 1966. Since then her talent and influence have spread into many fields, making her one of our most esteemed literary exports and an international cultural superstar.
Let us now praise a famous woman. Or should that be women? Margaret Atwood has done so much so well so often that you could be forgiven for thinking she had cloned sundry selves to accomplish it all.
While she has been the Energizer Bunny in our cultural landscape for decades, Ms. Atwood seemed to step up her game in the last 10 years, simultaneously deepening her art, increasing her popularity and spreading her influence. Indeed, she's such an unavoidable, almost elemental presence that sometimes she's in danger of being taken for granted.
What Ms. Atwood has, at 70, that other artists don't is resonance. Not only did she take care of business on the artistic front, including three top-notch novels – among them The Blind Assassin , winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize – she brilliantly embodied Percy Shelley's notion of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Whether working on behalf of International PEN and Amnesty International, protesting environmental degradation, “mirroring the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” or tweaking Stephen Harper, Ms. Atwood has been the public intellectual par excellence of the new century.
This was perhaps most tellingly exemplified by 2008's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth , both a highly popular cross-country lecture series and a phenomenally successful book that once again demonstrated Ms. Atwood's timeliness while wittily elucidating the myriad sources of our current economic discontent.
Somewhere in there, she also found time to serve (twice) as a judge for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, mentor new writers (most notably Vincent Lam), help launch the Griffin Poetry Prize and write for both stage ( The Penelopiad ) and opera house (the libretto for The Handmaid's Tale ). And, lest we forget, there's the LongPen, that quirky long-distance autographing device Ms. Atwood invented to bridge the digital/hard-copy divide.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood's star enters the century's second decade older, of course, but high, undiminished and uneclipsed. Has there ever been a Canadian artist who has so consistently combined commercial success with critical acclaim and intellectual clout?
“A voice is a human gift,” she once observed. “It should be cherished and used. ... Powerlessness and silence go together.”
Based on her voluminous and enduring accomplishments, it's clear Ms. Atwood has no intention of surrendering to the sound of silence any time soon.
James Adams is a national arts correspondent with The Globe and Mail.
