Margaret Atwood

Who Is Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood is one of the most significant and widely read novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — a Canadian writer whose work spans poetry, fiction, criticism, and speculative narrative, and whose influence on the literary imagination of the English-speaking world is difficult to overstate. Born in Ottawa and educated at Victoria University (Toronto) and Radcliffe College (Harvard), she has published more than fifty books and has received virtually every major literary honor available to a writer in the Anglophone world.

Her masterwork, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), is a speculative novel set in the near-future theocratic republic of Gilead, where women have been stripped of all rights and reduced to reproductive functions. It is one of the most widely discussed works of fiction of the past half century — a warning against the abuse of religious language in the service of political power that has been claimed by political movements across the ideological spectrum, often in ways that misread it.

Atwood is not a Christian writer, and The Handmaid’s Tale is in some ways a hostile text toward conservative Christianity. But TLA’s argument is that the novel discloses, in spite of Atwood’s intentions, something important about the relationship between genuine faith and the coercion that masquerades as it. The horror of Gilead is not that it is religious but that it is a false religion — that it uses the language and structures of faith to serve the interests of power. This distinction, which Atwood draws with considerable precision, is itself a form of witness to what authentic faith looks like by contrast.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Handmaid's Tale — 1985 — novel
• The Testaments — 2019 — sequel, Booker Prize
• Alias Grace — 1996
• The Blind Assassin — 2000 — Booker Prize
• Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature — 1972 — criticism