Margaret Atwood books in order

Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet and critic, best known for the dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and a two-time winner of the Booker Prize.

She was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario. She took a BA at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in 1961 and an AM at Radcliffe College in 1962, followed by graduate study at Harvard. Her first book was a poetry pamphlet, Double Persephone, issued in 1961 by John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press; it won the E. J. Pratt Medal.

Her novels began with The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972). The Handmaid's Tale followed in 1985 and won the Governor General's Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and, in 1987, the first Arthur C. Clarke Award. Cat's Eye (1988) was a finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize, Alias Grace (1996) took the Giller Prize, and The Blind Assassin (2000) won the Booker Prize. Oryx and Crake (2003) opened the MaddAddam trilogy, and The Testaments (2019), a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, shared the 2019 Booker. She has written more than 50 books across fiction, poetry, criticism and graphic novels, published in over 45 countries.

For collectors. The true first edition of The Handmaid's Tale is the Canadian one, published by McClelland and Stewart in Toronto on 17 April 1985. The first UK edition was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. Double Persephone, as a small 1961 pamphlet, is her earliest publication.