Margaret Atwood's Toronto

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 but moved with her family to Toronto in 1946, at around age six — the city where, as she has said, she first felt pulled toward writing.

Victoria College, under Northrop Frye

Atwood enrolled at Victoria College, University of Toronto, earning her B.A. in 1961. There, notably, she studied under Northrop Frye, whose ideas about myth and literary structure are often cited as an influence on her own work. She went on to a master's degree at Radcliffe College (Harvard), returning to Toronto in 1972–73 as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto.

Five decades in the Annex

Atwood has lived in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood since the mid-1980s, on Admiral Road, making her arguably the district's most famous literary resident — an area long associated with U of T faculty and Toronto's intellectual community. Her literary honours include two Booker Prizes (The Blind Assassin, 2000; The Testaments, 2019) and the Order of Canada, and she remains one of the University of Toronto's most prominent living alumni.

Sources

• University of Toronto Alumni — Margaret Atwood
• Margaret Atwood — Official Biography