Margaret Atwood Biography | Author of Surfacing

Surfacing Author Biography

Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to Carl Edmund (an entomologist) and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. As she was growing up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto, she spent a great deal of time in the woods where, like the narrator of Surfacing, she developed an enthusiasm for environmental issues. She began writing when she was six years old. By the time she became a teenager, she had written poems, short stories, and cartoons for her high school newspaper, and she had decided that she wanted to devote her life to writing. She earned an undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1961 and her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1962. After completing her education, she taught at several universities including the University of British Columbia, the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, and York University in Toronto. She...
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