Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.

Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her MaddAddam trilogy – the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – is currently being adapted for television. Some of her recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Her novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize and the Premio Mondello; and The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale –a multiple Emmy-award-winning TV series with MGM and Hulu – and The Penelopiad. The Heart Goes Last was published in September 2015; following is Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, and Angel Catbird, a graphic novel with co-creator Johnnie Christmas. Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.