Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She spent much of her childhood in northern Quebec due to her father's entomological research, not attending school full-time until age twelve. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 1961 and earned an MA from Radcliffe College in 1962. A prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor, she began writing professionally in the 1960s and has become one of Canada's most celebrated authors. Atwood's career spans eighteen novels including the dystopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985, Governor General's Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Blind Assassin (2000, Booker Prize), the MaddAddam Trilogy, and The Testaments (2019, joint Booker Prize winner with Bernardine Evaristo). Her themes explore gender, identity, power, language, myth, and environmental issues. She has won two Booker Prizes, the Franz Kafka Prize, and numerous other honours including Companion of the Order of Canada. She also co-invented the LongPen remote signing device.