Born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1939, Margaret Atwood is the daughter on an entomologist. Because of her father's work, the writer spent a good portion of time during her early years in the wilderness in the North of Quebec Province.

Though she moved to Toronto when she was seven, her childhood experiences with nature influenced her greatly. Those early experiences in the outdoors are apparent throughout her writings.

The Canadian would earn her bachelors degree at the University of Toronto before moving on to earn her masters from Radcliffe College. In 1961, Atwood's first collection of poetry was published. Entitled "Double Persephone," the collection would immediately provide her with critical acclaim and the E. J. Pratt Medal.

Though she began her Ph.D. work at Harvard University, she left the prestigious college to begin a teaching career at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Atwood would go on to hold many teaching positions in Canada while she was at work on her second collection of poetry, "The Circle Game.' That collection also earned Atwood acclaim in the form of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award and the Governor General's Award.

Shortly thereafter, Atwood published her first novel, "The Edible Woman" in 1970. That work established her as a feminist and she continued to publish poetry as well as her first book of short stories "Dancing Girls and Other Stories" in 1977.

Her 1986 novel, "The Handmaid's Tale," won numerous awards including The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, and the Commonwealth Literature Prize. Atwood is now the author of more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her novel, "The Blind Assassin," was successful in winning the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2000.

Atwood's fiction is often littered with symbolism and she has written both fantasy and satire. In addition, her novels often have a comic touch as well.

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grape juice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.