Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author whose The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments established her as one of the most important political and speculative novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Margaret Atwood has been one of the dominant voices in English-language literature for six decades, publishing across fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and speculative fiction with consistent intellectual energy. She is perhaps most famous for The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, which imagined a near-future theocratic America where women who can bear children are forced into sexual servitude. The novel was drawn explicitly from real historical precedents rather than invented ones — Atwood has consistently insisted that nothing in it didn’t happen somewhere — and its resurgence in cultural prominence after 2016 made it one of the defining texts of contemporary feminist politics.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a cold and precise novel. Its narrator, Offred, tells her story in careful, controlled fragments, and the horror is registered through accumulation of domestic detail and suppressed fury rather than dramatic climax. The Testaments, published in 2019 and winner of the Booker Prize (shared with Bernardine Evaristo), returns to Gilead thirty years later through three female narrators including the formidable Aunt Lydia, and is a more propulsive and accessible book if a somewhat less unsettling one. Together they form a remarkably durable imagining of how authoritarian systems trap women’s bodies while asking women to police each other.

Atwood’s critics have occasionally argued that she subordinates character to political architecture, and that her work can feel more brilliant than felt. Those observations are not entirely unfair. But she has earned her position as essential reading by being right, repeatedly, about the directions history can take — and by being a writer of extraordinary craft and range.