Margaret Atwood is a prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, activist and writer whose works have found a worldwide audience beyond her native Canada. Atwood is a winner of the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, and has been a finalist for the Canadian Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice.
While her novels have garnered her global recognition, her poetry is also highly regarded and she has published a number of anthologies. Blending both feminist and mythological themes her novels, usually set in the past or near future often explore the misogynistic or paternalistic streams in contemporary mainstream society.
Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1939 into a well-to-do professional family. After the family moved to Toronto, Atwood studied at the University of Toronto, where she met the noted Canadian literary critic Northrop Fry whose ideas influenced her deeply. Upon graduation Atwood won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, receiving her M.A. in 1962. Atwood then went on to study Victorian literature at Harvard.
Atwood published her first collection of poems “Double Persephone” at the age of 19 in 1961.  A second collection “The Circle Game” received the Canadian Governor General's Award for poetry in 1966. Her fame grew with the publication of “The Edible Woman” in 1969, a story that put her at the forefront of North American feminist writers.
After a brief stint teaching English at UBC in Vancouver, Atwood returned to Toronto and began work as an editor at Anansi Publishing. She published a number of essays that assailed Canadian literature as dull, provincial and overly coloured by a colonial mentality.

Atwood followed her success with the Edible Woman with the novel "Surfacing" in 1972. However it wasn’t until 1985 and the publication of “The Handmaid’s Tale" that helped Atwood garner a worldwide audience.
Atwood has continued to teach in Canada and the United States and her novels and poetry continue to win awards. "Cat’s Eye" (1989), "Alias Grace" (1996), "The Blind Assassin" (2000- winner of the 2000 Booker Prize --" Oryx and Crake" (2003) and "The Penelopiad" (2005). She also continued to publish poetry, edit literary collections and write for a variety of magazines.

The Handmaid’s Tale
Published in 1985, Atwood’s dystopia was inevitably compared to Orwell's classic “1984,” which had gone through a renaissance the year before. The story set in the near future where the United States has become the Republic of Gilead, a state ruled by religious fundamentalism. All the hard won freedoms women have gained have been revoked women have become little more than the chattel of the male elite.
Pollution and radiation has destroyed the reproductive systems of many women. Wives of the elite obtain “handmaids,” young women whose ovaries have survived and use them as sexual slaves to give their husbands offspring.
Society is highly stratified, with men in ruling roles and women divided into various under castes, usually divided by distinctive dress.
The story follows the journey of Offred, a "handmaid" who keeps a secret diary and comments on the world around her and details her illegal romance with a chauffeur of her ruling class master. The story also uses flashbacks reflecting on the time before the states of emergency led to the creation of Gilead.
"The Handmaid’s Tale" obviously has a number of feminist themes and was published just as a backlash against feminists began that was part of the shift to right wing politics in North America. It also addresses fears raised by the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the US and Islamic fundamentalism in the middle east. Interestingly, a subtext of the novel is a criticism of some contemporary feminists who made peace with right wingers in order to persecute a particular censorship agenda.
"The Handmaid's Tale" won the Governor General's Award for 1985, and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. It has been adapted several times into performance works and into a film in 1990.