Canadian · b. 1939
Margaret Atwood has been writing about power and survival for sixty years. "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985) imagined a theocratic America where fertile women become property; "The Testaments" (2019) returned to Gilead and shared the Booker Prize. "The Blind Assassin" (2000) won the Booker outright—a nested narrative of two sisters, a pulp science fiction novel, and Canadian history. "Oryx and Crake" (2003) began her MaddAddam trilogy of biotechnological apocalypse. The Canadian author writes poetry, literary criticism, and opera libretti. Her Twitter presence is as distinctive as her fiction. At eighty-six, she remains prolific.