Canadian · b. 1939
Booker Prize (2000, 2019), Arthur C. Clarke Award, PEN Pinter Prize
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author whose The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments established her as one of the most important political and speculative novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Margaret Atwood has been one of the dominant voices in English-language literature for six decades, publishing across fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and speculative fiction with consistent intellectual energy. She is perhaps most famous for The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, which imagined a near-future theocratic America where women who can bear children are forced into sexual servitude. The novel was drawn explicitly from real historical precedents rather than invented ones — Atwood has consistently insisted that nothing in it didn’t happen somewhere — and its resurgence in cultural prominence after 2016 made it one of the defining texts of contemporary feminist politics.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a cold and precise novel. Its narrator, Offred, tells her story in careful, controlled fragments, and the horror is registered through accumulation of domestic detail and suppressed fury rather than dramatic climax. The Testaments, published in 2019 and winner of the Booker Prize (shared with Bernardine Evaristo), returns to Gilead thirty years later through three female narrators including the formidable Aunt Lydia, and is a more propulsive and accessible book if a somewhat less unsettling one. Together they form a remarkably durable imagining of how authoritarian systems trap women’s bodies while asking women to police each other.
Atwood’s critics have occasionally argued that she subordinates character to political architecture, and that her work can feel more brilliant than felt. Those observations are not entirely unfair. But she has earned her position as essential reading by being right, repeatedly, about the directions history can take — and by being a writer of extraordinary craft and range.
by Margaret Atwood
Based on the true story of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper in 1843. A young psychiatrist interviews Grace in prison — the novel is his attempt to determine whether she is guilty, innocent, or something more complicated.
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by Margaret Atwood
Snowman may be the last human alive after an engineered plague has wiped out humanity. Surviving among a tribe of genetically modified humanoids, he looks back on his friendship with the brilliant, catastrophic Crake — and the world they destroyed together.
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by Margaret Atwood
Iris Chase, elderly and alone, narrates the story of her family's collapse over the 20th century. Nested within her memoir is her dead sister Laura's posthumous novel — and within that, a pulp science-fiction story told by clandestine lovers. The Booker Prize winner 2000.
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by Margaret Atwood
In the theocratic Republic of Gilead, women have been stripped of all rights and assigned to roles based on their fertility, one of whom narrates her life as a state-assigned Handmaid.
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by Margaret Atwood
The conclusion of the MaddAddam Trilogy — survivors of the waterless flood, including the Crakers (Crake's genetically engineered humans), form an uneasy community. Toby must tell the Crakers stories about the old world as they all try to build something new.
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by Margaret Atwood
The second MaddAddam Trilogy novel — Toby and Ren, former members of the God's Gardeners environmental cult, survive the waterless flood that destroyed civilization. Their stories run parallel to the events of Oryx and Crake, seen from a different angle.
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by Margaret Atwood
Set fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale, three women's testimonies reveal how Gilead began to crumble from within, led by the most unlikely of architects.
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by Margaret Atwood
Penelope narrates the story of her husband Odysseus's twenty-year absence from the afterlife, offering her own corrective to the heroic narrative — including her account of why the twelve maids who served her were hanged at Odysseus's return. Part of the Canongate Myths series.
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The best Canadian literature — from Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Essential Canadian novels.
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Margaret Atwood's complete bibliography in order — from The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace to Oryx and Crake and The Testaments. Best starting points and reading order.
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Where to start with Margaret Atwood — whether to begin with The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, or Oryx and Crake. A complete reading guide to Atwood's novels.
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The Handmaid's Tale and 1984 are the two most studied dystopian novels. Here's how they differ, what each does best, and which to read first — plus what to read after both.
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If The Handmaid's Tale's vision of Gilead unsettled you, these dystopian novels explore the same territory of power, gender, and survival.
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