Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born November 18, 1939, and published her first work in 1961. Over the next six decades she built a staggering output: 18 novels, 18 poetry collections, 11 nonfiction books, nine short story collections, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and more. The 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale became her best-known work, but the through-line across everything — poems drawn from myth and fairy tale, fiction probing gender and climate and the mechanics of control — was an obsession with how power works and how stories shape what we think is possible. She won t…