Margaret Atwood arrives on the red carpet for the Giller Prize gala ceremony in Toronto, on Nov. 18, 2019. The trustees of the Griffin Poetry Prize will present Atwood with a Lifetime Recognition Award.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Before she became one of the world’s most important and admired novelists, Margaret Atwood was a poet. Not counting the self-published Double Persephone from 1961, her first book of poems was The Circle Game. It won her a 1966 Governor General’s Literary Award at just 27 years of age.
The Circle Game‘s first poem was This Is a Photograph of Me, about someone inseparable from the landscape. The poem that opens with “It was taken some time ago” ends with the line, “but if you look long enough, eventually, you will be able to see me.”
Some 60 years after she wrote those words, Atwood is to be presented on Wednesday evening in Toronto with a Lifetime Recognition Award by the trustees of the Griffin Poetry Prize. It is another in a long history of honours given to the 85-year-old writer best known for the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, later adapted for a television series that won 15 Primetime Emmy Awards over six seasons.
The Ottawa native has published more than a dozen books of poetry, beginning with Double Persephone, which earned her the University of Toronto’s E.J. Pratt Award in Poetry as an undergraduate student.
Perhaps her best-known book of poems is 1970’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a fanciful reconstruction of the author’s life. More obscure is 1966’s Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, illustrated by Charles Pachter.
Power Politics from 1971 contained a celebrated simile not for the squeamish: “You fit into me like a hook into an eye, a fish hook, an open eye.”
Atwood will receive the Lifetime Recognition Award at Toronto’s Koerner Hall on June 4, when this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize will also be presented. She will be in conversation with U.S. poet Carolyn Forché as part of the readings by the nominees for the prize.
The $130,000 international Griffin Poetry Prize is the world’s most generous for a first-edition collection of poetry written in or translated into English. It was established in 2000 by Canadian businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. Atwood is a co-founder and trustee emeritus of the prize.
The Lifetime Recognition Award was instituted by the Griffin trustees in 2006. The previous Canadian and international recipients are Don MacKay, Fanny Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nicole Brossard, Ana Blandiana, Frank Bidart, Adam Zagajewski, Derek Walcott, Adélia Prado, Seamus Heaney, Yves Bonnefoy, Adrienne Rich, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ko Un, Tomas Transtromer and Robin Blaser.
As a novelist, Atwood won the Governor General’s Award for The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 and the Giller Prize for Alias Grace in 1996. She took the Booker Prize twice, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
In 2020, she released Dearly, her first collection of new poetry in more than a decade. Last year saw the publication of the career-spanning collection, Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023.
