Margaret Atwood

Born Margaret Eleanor Atwood on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, the daughter of Carl Edmund Atwood, a forest entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killam, a former dietitian from Nova Scotia. Because of her father's fieldwork, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec, traveling between research stations, and did not attend school full-time until she was twelve. She read voraciously, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Dell pocket mysteries, Canadian animal stories, and began writing at six. She realized at sixteen that writing would be her vocation. At Victoria College in the University of Toronto, she studied under Northrop Frye, whose theories of literary archetypes profoundly shaped her thinking. She earned her master's at Radcliffe College, Harvard, in 1962, and began but did not complete a doctoral dissertation on the English metaphysical romance. Her first major novel, The Edible Woman (1969), announced her central preoccupation with the ways women are consumed by social expectation. Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a dystopian vision of a theocratic America that enslaves women as breeding vessels, and The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the Booker Prize, established her as one of the most significant novelists of her generation. The Handmaid's Tale became a cultural phenomenon, its red robes and white bonnets appearing at political protests worldwide. Its sequel, The Testaments (2019), won a second Booker Prize, shared with Bernardine Evaristo. Across more than sixty years, Atwood has published eighteen novels, eighteen books of poetry, and volumes of criticism and essays. She is also the inventor of the LongPen, a device for remote robotic writing.

In the spring of 1984, living in West Berlin on a fellowship, Atwood began The Handmaid's Tale, writing longhand on yellow legal pads and typing the pages on a rented typewriter with a German keyboard. The Wall circled the city, and on visits behind it she noted the silences, the changed subjects, the wariness that would become Gilead.