Margaret Atwood is a prominent poet and novelist known for her gothic criticisms of society, relationships, and gender politics. In the past quarter century, she has become one of the leading voices of our age.

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. She grew up in the cold wilderness of Canada, whose frigid landscape features heavily in her writing. She started writing at a young age, looking up to Edgar Allan Poe. Her prose and poetry echo his gothic style.

Atwood and her novels are frequently regarded as feminist, though Atwood herself explains that she never tried to champion any movement, instead she just wrote what she saw around her. As she said in a recent interview, “people want you to be on their side, which to them means you have to be their puppet. Not a good fit for me.” Despite this declaration, her work naturally lends itself to the women’s rights movement, as her novels and poems often explore the ways in which the patriarchy exploits women. Atwood’s most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, posits a North America wherein a fertility crisis is answered by the violation of reproductive rights by a tyrannical theocratic government. The work explores the different ways women experience oppression and the ways in which women can be complicit in their own subjugation. Most of her novels, like The Handmaid’s Tale, feature a woman struggling with her identity, relationships, and understanding of the world at large, though it is difficult to typify Atwood’s work due to the variety of themes and genres she explores over her dozens of novels. Some of her more prominent themes include alienation, wilderness, religion, survival, identity, and gender dynamics. Her tone is often sardonic and grim. Atwood’s body of work criticizes, warps, and subverts structures, both societal and literary. She frequently interacts with genre and tropes, often blurring the lines of the categories. While Atwood’s works are regarded as literary, her novels are accessible, as she has stated she writes for an audience who reads books for their plot.

A sharp and intelligent voice of critique, Atwood is one of the most prominent authors of her generation, decorated with more than 55 awards throughout her impressive career. She lives in Toronto with her partner and still writes.