Margaret Atwood

Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec and Ontario, where her father conducted forest-insect research, learning to read late but voraciously once she started. She studied at the University of Toronto under the critic Northrop Frye and did graduate work at Harvard, absorbing both structuralist theory and a deep unease about American power that runs through her fiction.

The Handmaid's Tale, published in 1985, drew on Puritan New England history, 1980s religious-right politics, and Ceaușescu's Romania to build its theocracy, and has been continuously in print since. She won the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and again in 2019 for The Testaments, a sequel written partly in response to the novel's television adaptation.

Long partnered with the novelist Graeme Gibson until his death in 2019, she has remained a prolific public voice on environmentalism and civil liberties alongside her fiction and poetry.