Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario. She earned a BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and an MA from Harvard University.

Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her works of poetry include Dearly (Ecco, 2020); The Door (Houghton Mifflin 2007); Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965–1995 (Virago Press Limited, 1998); and Morning in the Burned House (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), which was a co-winner of the Trillium Award.

Among Atwood’s novels are The Testaments (Nan A. Talese, 2019), winner of the Booker Prize; The Blind Assassin (Doubleday, 2000), which won the Booker Prize and the Dashiell Hammett Prize; and The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She is also the author of Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025). Her work has been translated into many languages and published in more than twenty-five countries. 

Atwood’s other honors and awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Molson Award, the Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award, and a Canada Short Fiction Award. In 1986, Ms. magazine named her Woman of the Year.

Atwood has served as a writer in residence and a lecturer at many colleges and universities. She lives in Toronto.