Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa and spent much of her childhood in the forests of northern Ontario and Quebec, where her father studied insects. She studied English at the University of Toronto and did graduate work at Radcliffe College and Harvard.

Her first success was poetry: The Circle Game won Canada's Governor General's Award in 1966. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, followed in 1969. Since then she has written more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and criticism, many about women's lives, power and the environment.

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) imagines the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the United States and forces fertile women to bear children for the ruling class. Atwood said she put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere in history. The book argues that people can lose their rights fast when fear makes them give those rights up. A television series from 2017 brought it new readers. Its sequel, The Testaments (2019), won the Booker Prize, which she had also won for The Blind Assassin. She lives in Toronto.