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 university studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Atwood received 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, most of them centering on women seeking to understand 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 television series based on the novel premiered in 2017. 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 Testaments was adapted into a television series of the same name, in 2026, created by Bruce Miller.

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 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 perspectives of Odysseus’s wife, the faithful Penelope, and her 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 a political or 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’s memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, was published on November 4, 2025. In the United States it appeared with Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Simultaneous editions were issued by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom.

Atwood described the nearly 600-page work as a vessel for “stupid things, catastrophes, revenges, and times of political horror,” balanced with “moments of joy, and surprising events.” Spanning her life from a childhood in northern Quebec’s wilderness to literary stardom with The Handmaid’s Tale, it explores her dual selves: the free-spirited “Peggy Nature” and the brooding Scorpio drawn to the supernatural.

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.

Atwood’s invention: The LongPen

Atwood is credited as the inventor of the LongPen, a remote-signing device she conceived in 2004 and later developed with a team. The idea came to her after she watched a courier collect a signature on an electronic pad and mistakenly assumed the handwriting was being transmitted onto a piece of paper, elsewhere, in real time. Prompted by the practical limits of international book tours, she wondered whether the same principle could let her inscribe a book for a reader on the other side of the world without being physically present. Realizing the technology didn’t exist, she assembled a small team, led by project director Matthew Gibson, and founded a company called Unotchit (a phonetic spelling of “you no touch it”), later renamed Syngrafii Corporation, to build it.

The LongPen pairs a stylus and electronic tablet on the author’s side with a robotic arm holding an interchangeable pen on the recipient’s side. Both parties speak and see each other through a video link, and when the author writes a dedication on the tablet, the arm reproduces it in actual ink onto the physical book, preserving the original handwriting rather than producing a digital copy.

Atwood demonstrated the LongPen publicly for the first time at the London Book Fair in March 2006, dedicating a copy of her short story collection The Tent (2006) to Nigel Newton, the head of her British publisher Bloomsbury, while Newton stood at a receiving station elsewhere in the exhibition hall.

Both Bloomsbury and Atwood’s other British publisher, Virago, invested in the venture. Atwood framed the device not as a way to avoid readers but as a means of including audiences from places that traditional book tours typically do not reach. She also argued that the technology reduced the carbon footprint of intercontinental travel.

By the end of the decade, the technology had moved beyond book signings: The Ontario provincial government adopted a unit for executing original legal documents remotely.

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 The 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).