Margaret Atwood – Author Biography
Early Life
Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Canada. Because her father was an entomologist, she spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec, an upbringing that seeded her lifelong fascination with wilderness and survival. She studied at the University of Toronto and then at Harvard’s Radcliffe College, publishing her first book of poetry while still a student.
Career
Atwood began as a poet — The Circle Game (1966) won the Governor General’s Award — before turning to fiction with The Edible Woman (1969). Her international breakthrough came with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a dystopia of theocratic America that became a cultural touchstone. She has since published more than 50 books across novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and children’s books, while also becoming a prominent environmental activist and inventor (of the LongPen remote-signing device).
Major Works
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its sequel The Testaments (2019), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000), the MaddAddam trilogy beginning with Oryx and Crake (2003), Surfacing (1972), Cat’s Eye (1988), and The Robber Bride (1993). Her poetry collections include Power Politics and Morning in the Burned House.
Writing Style and Themes
Atwood writes with icy precision, dark wit, and a poet’s ear for language. Her great subjects are power and survival: who holds power over women’s bodies, over nature, over the future. She famously insists her dystopias contain nothing that hasn’t already happened somewhere — “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction. Her narrators are often unreliable women reconstructing their own stories, and her work circles questions of complicity: how ordinary people accommodate themselves to terrible systems.
Legacy
Atwood won the Booker Prize twice — for The Blind Assassin (2000) and, shared, for The Testaments (2019) — and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. The Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale turned her red-cloaked handmaids into global protest iconography. She is widely considered the greatest living Canadian writer and one of the most important literary voices of the last half-century.
