Margaret Atwood

An Evening with Margaret Atwood

Date: November 18, 2013 7:30pm

November 18, 2013 7:30pm Location: Englert Theater

Englert Theater Cost: Free Admission

The Dr. Cassandra S. Foens Annual Lecture

Margaret Atwood is a giant of modern literature who refuses to rest on her laurels. She has anticipated, satirized, and even changed the popular pre-conceptions of our time, and is the rare writer whose work is adored by the public, acclaimed by the critics, and read on university campuses. On stage, Atwood is both serious minded and wickedly funny.

A winner of many international literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize, Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and non-fiction. She is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Her non-fiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, was recently made into a documentary. Her new book, Madaddam (the third novel in the Oryx and Crake trilogy), has received rave reviews: "An extraordinary achievement" (The Independent); "A fitting and joyous conclusion" (The New York Times).

Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004, she co-invented the LongPen, a remote signing device that allows someone to write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the internet. She is also a popular personality on Twitter, with over 300,000 followers.

Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.