Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec, where her father, an entomologist, did his research. She didn’t go to school full time until she was 12, read Grimms’ fairy tales and pulp mysteries, and decided at 16 that she would be a writer.

She started with poetry. Her first book, Double Persephone, was a pamphlet published in 1961, and in 1966 The Circle Game won the Governor General’s Award. She has since published 18 books of poetry, as many as her novels, and many of the poems draw on the myths and fairy tales she loved as a child. Dearly (2020) is about ageing, absence and grief, and its title poem is about her partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019.

Then there is The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). In Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the United States, women are sorted into castes and kept under men’s control. Atwood has often said she put nothing in the book that someone, somewhere, had not already done. She has won the Booker Prize twice: for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and in 2019 for the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. In between, Alias Grace (1996) retells a real double murder in 1843 Canada.

Read The Handmaid’s Tale first, then pick up Dearly: the same sharp eye, in far fewer pages. Margaret Atwood published a memoir, Book of Lives, in 2025.