Literature
Margaret Atwood
Novelist, author of The Handmaid's Tale
Born 1939
Photo: Collision Conf · CC BY 2.0
«A word after a word after a word is power.»
Margaret Atwood has published more than fifty books and won the Booker Prize twice, most famously for the dystopia The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel. She writes poetry, criticism and graphic novels as well as fiction.
Key achievements
- Booker Prize twice, in 2000 and 2019
- The Handmaid's Tale, translated into more than forty languages
- More than fifty books of fiction, poetry and criticism
Universities
Toronto, Ontario
Took a bachelor's degree in English at Victoria College in 1961.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Took a master's degree at Radcliffe College in 1962 and began but did not finish a doctorate.
Facts
- She has said every event in The Handmaid's Tale has a historical precedent somewhere, and she kept a file of clippings to prove it.
- She invented a remote signing device so that authors could sign books for readers on another continent.
- She spent much of her childhood in the Canadian forest where her father studied insects, and did not attend school full time until she was eleven.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.