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 two Booker Prizes, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and lifetime honors from the National Book Critics Circle and PEN. She also founded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada, became a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and invented the LongPen, a device for signing books remotely by robot.