Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective. Among Atwood’s many acclaimed works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, her most celebrated is the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

(Read Britannica’s article “10 Devastating Dystopias.”)

Early life and education

As an adolescent, Atwood divided her time between Toronto, her family’s primary residence, and the sparsely settled bush country in northern Canada, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research. She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. After completing her university studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Atwood earned a master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962.

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Novels

Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in Atwood’s novels, all of them centering on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them. The Handmaid’s Tale (film 1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; an acclaimed TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood. In 2019 The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was published to critical acclaim and was a cowinner (with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other) of the Booker Prize.

The Blind Assassin (2000) is an intricately constructed narrative centering on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman ostensibly writing in order to dispel confusion about both her sister’s suicide and her own role in the posthumous publication of a novel supposedly written by her sister. The novel garnered Atwood her first Booker Prize.

Other novels by Atwood include the surreal The Edible Woman (1969); Surfacing (1972; film 1981), an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture that focuses on a woman’s return to her childhood home in the northern wilderness of Quebec; Lady Oracle (1976); Cat’s Eye (1988); The Robber Bride (1993; television film 2007); and Alias Grace (1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial. A TV miniseries based on the latter work aired in 2017, written by Atwood and Sarah Polley. Atwood’s 2005 novel, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, was inspired by Homer’s epic The Odyssey, this time told from the perspective of Odysseus’s wife, the faithful Penelope, and Penelope’s maids.

In Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood describes a plague-induced apocalypse in the near future through the observations and flashbacks of a protagonist who is possibly the event’s sole survivor. Minor characters from that book retell the dystopian tale from their own perspectives in The Year of the Flood (2009). MaddAddam (2013), which continues to pluck at the biblical, eschatological, and anticorporate threads running through the two previous novels, brings the satirical trilogy to a denouement. The Heart Goes Last (2015), originally published as a serial e-book (2012–13), imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a community that functions like a prison. Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

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Poetry

In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood ponders human behavior, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. She continued to write poetry alongside her fiction output. Her 16th collection, Dearly, was published in 2020. In 2024 she released Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023, a collection that traces the evolution of her poetry across six decades of her writing career. It also includes the entirety of Dearly and another earlier volume, Power Politics (1971).

Other fiction and nonfiction works

Atwood also writes short stories, collected in such volumes as Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), Moral Disorder (2006), Stone Mattress (2014), and Old Babes in the Wood: Stories (2023).

Her nonfiction includes Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), which grew out of a series of lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge; Payback (2008; film 2012), an impassioned essay that treats debt—both personal and governmental—as a cultural issue rather than as a political or an economic one; In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), in which she illuminates her relationship to science fiction; and Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 (2022), a collection of diverse writings as well as several speeches.

Atwood also penned the libretto for the opera Pauline, about Pauline Johnson, a Canadian poet-performer of Mohawk and English heritage; it premiered at the York Theatre in Vancouver in 2014. She has also written radio and TV scripts and edited anthologies of Canadian literature.

Teaching career and honors

In addition to writing, Atwood has taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2016 for the spirit of political activism threading her life and works. Her many other honors include two Governor General’s Literary Awards (in 1966 for Circle Game and in 1986 for The Handmaid’s Tale), a Guggenheim fellowship (1981), the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle (2017), the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (2020).