Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian writer and inventor, born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario. She is one of the most respected voices in modern literature, known for novels, poetry, criticism, and her curiosity about language, gender, climate, and power.

What she writes
Atwood’s work covers many kinds of stories. She is best known for The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel from 1985 that looks at women's rights and society. Other famous books include Surfacing (1972), Cat’s Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin (2000). She also wrote Oryx and Crake (2003) and the MaddAddam trilogy that follows it, with The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. In 2019 she published The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Booker Prize. She has also written historical fiction like The Penelopiad (2005) and modern takes on classics such as Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of The Tempest.

Themes and style
Atwood often writes about gender and identity, the power of language, myths and fairy tales, and environmental issues. She uses both realistic stories and speculative or “what could happen” scenarios to explore big questions about society and humanity. She sometimes describes her work as speculative fiction rather than strictly science fiction, saying it uses ideas from today to imagine possible futures.

Awards and honors
She has won many important literary prizes, including two Booker Prizes (for The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) and the Governor General’s Award, among others. Her work has helped shape Canadian literature, and she has founded or helped lead key literary organizations in Canada, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers’ Trust of Canada. She has received honorary degrees from universities around the world.

Other roles and inventions
Besides writing, Atwood has been a teacher, editor, and critic. She invented the LongPen, a remote-writing device that lets her write from a distance. The idea grew into a company that later became Syngrafii, which works with digital writing and signatures. She has also given lectures and written essays on literature, debt, and justice.

Personal life
Atwood grew up moving between Ottawa, northern Quebec, and Toronto, which gave her a broad view of Canadian life. She married writer Jim Polk in 1968, and they divorced in 1973. She then formed a life partnership with fellow writer Graeme Gibson, with whom she lived on a farm in Ontario and had a daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, born in 1976. Gibson passed away in 2019. Atwood spends time at a summer home on Pelee Island in Lake Erie.

Adaptations and collaborations
Several of Atwood’s works have been adapted for film, television, and theater. The Handmaid’s Tale became a highly successful TV series on Hulu starting in 2017, winning multiple Emmys. Alias Grace was adapted into a CBC/Netflix miniseries in 2017. The graphic novel based on The Handmaid’s Tale appeared in 2019, and other works have inspired operas, plays, and documentaries.

Today
Margaret Atwood remains active as a writer and thinker. She continues to publish, comment on social issues, and contribute to projects about language, literature, and the environment. Her work has left a lasting mark on readers around the world and on the way we think about the future, power, and the stories we tell.