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Portrait of Margaret Atwood

Literature · Novelists

Margaret Atwood

born 1939 · Canadian

Contemporary Canadian fiction and speculative dystopia

Margaret Atwood is Canada's best-known writer and the author of the most quoted dystopia of the last forty years, in which a theocratic republic forces fertile women into reproductive slavery. She has won the Booker Prize twice, in 2000 and, jointly, in 2019, and she is also a poet, critic and inventor. She insists her dystopias contain nothing that has not already happened somewhere, and prefers the label "speculative fiction" to "science fiction".

How to spot them

  • ▸The Republic of Gilead, red habits and white wings, and the Latin-sounding motto scratched in a cupboard
  • ▸Two Booker Prizes, the second of them shared
  • ▸Canadian identity and survival as a national theme, argued in her 1972 book of criticism
  • ▸The MaddAddam trilogy: gene-spliced pigoons and the Crakers
  • ▸"Speculative fiction", not science fiction — a distinction she has defended against Ursula K. Le Guin

Key works

The Edible Woman (1969)

Her first novel: Marian McAlpin finds she can no longer eat as her engagement closes in on her

Surfacing (1972)

A woman returns to a northern Quebec island to look for her missing father and strips away her civilised self

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)

Criticism arguing that survival and victimhood are the central Canadian literary theme

The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Offred in the Republic of Gilead; the Latin-ish joke Nolite te bastardes carborundorum is scratched inside her cupboard

Cat's Eye (1988)

A painter returns to Toronto for a retrospective and confronts the childhood friend who tormented her

Alias Grace (1996)

A novel built on the real case of Grace Marks, convicted of murder in Upper Canada in 1843

The Blind Assassin (2000)

Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and a pulp science-fiction story nested inside a novel inside a memoir; it won the Booker Prize

The Testaments (2019)

The sequel set fifteen years later, narrated in part by Aunt Lydia; it shared the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other

Key ideas

  • Dystopia built only from things that have already been done somewhere in history
  • Survival and the victim positions as the organising theme of Canadian writing
  • Environmental collapse and corporate biotechnology as the next dystopia, in the MaddAddam books

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa; much of her childhood was spent in the bush of northern Quebec with her entomologist father
  • •She wrote The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in 1984, while the Wall still stood
  • •The Handmaid's Tale won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award, in 1987, and was shortlisted for the Booker in 1986
  • •She won the Booker Prize outright in 2000 for The Blind Assassin
  • •In 2019 she shared the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo, the last time the judges broke the rule against splitting it
  • •The MaddAddam trilogy comprises Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam
  • •She invented the LongPen, a remote robotic signing device, for book signings
  • •In 2014 she gave Scribbler Moon to Norway's Future Library, to be printed in 2114
  • •A fireproof copy of The Handmaid's Tale, made to protest against book bans, was auctioned in 2022 after she took a flamethrower to it on camera and it refused to burn
  • •Her memoir Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts appeared in November 2025

Drill it — 9 cards

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