Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer, activist, educator, and inventor.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Atwood attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto as well as Radcliffe College at Harvard University, where she earned a master's degree before pursuing a doctorate in literary studies, although she did not complete her dissertation and left the program after two years. After the release of her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969, Atwood taught at York University while continuing to write and publish works of poetry and fiction. In 1985, she published The Handmaid's Tale, the novel for which she is best-known today.
Atwood has won numerous awards for her work and is one of the most decorated authors of the past few decades. In 1989, Atwood's novel Cat's Eye (1988) was a finalist for the Booker Prize. In 2000, her novel The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize, among a series of other awards and nominations. Her most recent work, The Testaments (2019), is a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale and also won the 2019 Booker Prize.
As a critic, Atwood is best known for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which came out at a time when Canadian literature was mostly absent from the Anglophone literary canon. Atwood is credited with having drawn attention to Canadian writers, and her identity as a Canadian author has featured heavily in the settings she uses for her realist novels. In 2004, Atwood invented the LongPen, a device that allows for remote signing of documents with the use of an internet-connected robotic hand.
Alias Grace was inspired by a real-life Canadian murder case. Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, were killed on 23 July 1843. Kinnear was shot, Nancy was strangled, and both bodies were dumped in Kinnear's cellar. Nancy was...
The Blind Assassin is a novel published on September 3, 2000, by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Atwood was born in Ottawa and was raised there. The setting of the story is in Canada, where the story centers on three main characters: Iris, Laura,...
Although Canadian author Margaret Atwood is best-known for writing the book The Handmaid's Tale, she is the author of a number of very well-respected novels. Among them is Cat's Eye, which released after The Handmaid's Tale.
When writing Cat's...
The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's first novel, was published in 1969 and established Margaret Atwood as one of the most important writers of the late 20th century. Atwood would go on to become famous for her use of socially conscious themes and...
Hag-Seed is a 2016 novel by the prolific novelist Margaret Atwood and is the seventh book in Hogarth's "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. Like the other novels of the series, it is a standalone retelling of one of Shakespeare's classics.
In Hag-Seed, ...
Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) reveals the strange new world of Gilead. Once the United States of America, Gilead was formed by a military coup that shot the President and members of Congress, suspended the...
Since 1961, Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels, 18 poetry books, and 9 collections of her short fiction, as well as many other works. In 2000, Atwood won the Booker Prize for her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, and followed this up with Oryx...
Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last (2015) is a dystopian novel about a desperate couple who sign away their freedom in exchange for the safety and comfort offered by an experimental walled community.
When a financial crash devastates the Rust...
The final installment of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's three book dystopian trilogy, MaddAddam was published in August 2013. It concludes the storyline which started with Oryx and Crake, continuing on to The Year of the Flood.
MaddAddam...
Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unspecified future. The book is written in the same style as many of Margaret Atwood's novels, that of speculative fiction. Although the book reads as if it is telling a...
Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad was published in 2005. it tells the story of Penelope, Odysseus's wife in Homer's The Oddysey. In the novel, Penelope tells her life story, including her version of the events discussed in The Odyssey. While...
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, journalist and activist, considered by some to be amongst the best living writers. She was born in 1939 in Canada's capital, Ottawa, to highly educated parents. Atwood took a keen interest in reading...
Short Fiction of Margaret Atwood is a compilation of short stories written by Margaret Atwood. Atwood is from Canada, and she is an author, poet, teacher, and an environmental activist. She is a prolific writer, as she has published almost 20...
After establishing herself as one of the leading 20th-century poets in Canada, the publication of Surfacing in 1972 instantly confirmed Margaret Atwood’s status as one the country’s most important novelists. Atwood’s unnamed heroine goes into the...
On November 28th, 2018, Margaret Atwood announced a sequel to her 1985 classic novel The Handmaid's Tale. Announcing the novel on her Twitter profile, she wrote: "Yes indeed to those who asked: I’m writing a sequel to The #HandmaidsTale....
In 1977, Canadian author Margaret Atwood published Dancing Girls, which would be her first of many short story collections. In sum, that collection totaled 14 stories. And though "When It Happens" was not the best-known short story contained in...
Published in 2009, The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In this speculative fiction trilogy, Atwood vividly describes a possible future created by ruthless corporations, disregard for the environment,...
