Margaret Atwood Biography

A prolific writer and a hit with literary critics, Canada’s Margaret Atwood became internationally famous after the popular and critical success of her 1984 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood began her career in the 1960s, teaching English and publishing poetry, short stories and literary criticism. She began publishing novels by the end of the decade.

Atwood’s most famous novel is The Handmaid’s Tale, in part because it was made into a 1990 movie starring Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway, and then a popular television series that began in 2017, starring Elisabeth Moss.

Atwood has continued to produce novels on a regular basis, and is known for her experimentation with re-telling old stories, from Greek myths to Shakespeare.

Her other novels include Surfacing (1972); Cat’s Eye (1988); Alias Grace (1996); the 2000 Booker Prize winner, The Blind Assassin; the dystopian trilogy that includes Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013); and The Heart Goes Last (2015).