Novelist Margaret Atwood to Present Nov. 2 Steloff Lecture
Booker Prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood will deliver the Frances Steloff Lecture
at Skidmore College at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 2, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain
Hall. Open to the public at no charge, the event is titled "Moral Disorder: Reading
and Commentary."
A Canadian native who is considered her country's most eminent novelist, Atwood has
for more than 30 years written poetry, short stories, children's literature, reviews,
and critical essays, winning critical acclaim and a loyal public following.
Her first publication, a book of poetry titled The Circle Game (1964) earned the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. She followed
with several more poetry collections and several books of short fiction, including
Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1982) and Good Bones (1992). She is best known for her novels. They include The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1973), The Handmaid's Tale (1986), Cat's Eye (1989), and Alias Grace (1996). The latter three were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, one of the world's
most prestigious literary awards. In 2000, Atwood received the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, one of Time magazine's "all-time 100 novels," which it called "a tour-de-force of nested narratives,
subtle reveals and buried memories." More recently, Atwood has published Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), and Oryx and Crake (2003), nominated for both the Booker Prize and the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction,
and a collection of short stories titled Moral Disorder (2006).
Born in 1939 in Ottawa, Atwood lived in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She
earned degrees from Victoria College, University of Toronto, and Radcliffe College
in Boston. She has held a variety of teaching positions and residencies and served
as president of the Writers Union of Canada during 1981-82 and president of PEN, Canada,
from 1984 to 1986.
The annual Steloff Lecture at Skidmore was established in 1967 by Frances Steloff,
a native of Saratoga Springs who became a well-known patron of writers and founded
the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. She endowed the lecture series as a way to
bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the College.
