Margaret Atwood

About Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She spent her childhood partly in the wilderness of northern Quebec and Ontario, where her father, an entomologist, conducted fieldwork — an upbringing she has cited as formative for her sense of nature, isolation, and survival. She attended Victoria University at the University of Toronto and went on to graduate work at Radcliffe College (Harvard). She has been a dominant figure in Canadian and international literature for more than fifty years.

Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and nonfiction. Her fiction includes The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Cat's Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the Man Booker Prize. She has received the Booker Prize twice, along with numerous other international honors including the PEN Pinter Prize and induction into the Order of Canada.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is Atwood's most widely read and most frequently banned book. Set in the near-future theocratic Republic of Gilead — a totalitarian regime built on the ruins of New England that has stripped women of property, employment, and reproductive autonomy — it is narrated by Offred, a woman whose sole sanctioned role is to bear children for powerful men. Atwood has said that she limited herself to depicting events that had already happened somewhere in the world; the novel draws on historical precedents across multiple societies and political systems.

The book was adapted into a critically acclaimed Hulu television series beginning in 2017, which brought new readers to the novel and gave its political themes renewed urgency. The sequel, The Testaments (2019), won the Booker Prize. Together the two novels have sold tens of millions of copies.

Why Her Work Has Been Banned

The Handmaid's Tale has been banned or challenged in more than 100 school districts across more than a dozen states. Challenges typically cite sexual content, profanity, and the book's portrayal of religion. Some challenges, particularly in more conservative communities, have focused on its depiction of theocratic governance as a form of oppression — a portrayal that its challengers argue is anti-religious.

Atwood has written at length about book challenges and censorship, arguing that attempts to suppress The Handmaid's Tale consistently underline its central point: that the control of information and access to it is itself a form of power. The book, she notes, has never been less relevant than its challengers would prefer.