You’ve probably seen the red capes. Those white-winged bonnets from The Handmaid’s Tale have become a shorthand for political protest from D.C. to Buenos Aires. But the woman behind them isn't just a "dystopian novelist." Honestly, that label is way too small. If you really want to know who is Margaret Atwood, you have to look past the Hulu series and into the Canadian woods where she basically grew up without a TV or a proper school.
She’s 86 now. In 2026, she’s still as sharp as a shard of glass and twice as likely to cut through your comfort zone. She’s a poet. She’s an inventor. She’s a bird watcher who can probably tell you more about tree-eating insects than your local exterminator. She’s also a two-time Booker Prize winner who somehow manages to be both a "literary giant" and a person who knits rats that were supposed to be rabbits.
The Girl from the North Woods
Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. Right as World War II was kicking off. Her dad, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist—a bug guy. Because of his research, the family spent half the year in the northern wilderness of Quebec and Ontario. No running water. No electricity. No other kids to play with.
She didn't even attend school full-time until she was about eleven. Instead, she read. A lot. She devoured Grimm’s Fairy Tales and comic books and even George Orwell’s Animal Farm at age nine, thinking it was just a cute story about pigs. That kind of isolation does something to a brain. It makes it observant. It makes it weird in the best possible way.
By sixteen, she knew. She was standing on a football field—weirdly specific, right?—and realized she was going to be a writer. She wrote her first "novel" at seven about an ant. It’s kinda poetic that she started with insects and ended up writing about the collapse of human civilization.
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Why Everyone Is Obsessed With Her Books
If you ask a random person who is Margaret Atwood, they’ll say "the Handmaid lady." But her career started with poetry and "edgy" satire. Her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), is about a woman who starts feeling like she’s being eaten by her own life. It’s funny, dark, and uncomfortable.
Then came the big one.
- The Handmaid’s Tale (1985): She wrote this on a typewriter in West Berlin while the Wall was still up. People call it "prophetic," but she famously says she didn't invent anything. Every horror in that book—the hangings, the stolen babies, the forbidden reading—had already happened somewhere in history.
- The Blind Assassin (2000): This one won her first Booker Prize. It’s a nested doll of a book. A story within a story within a story.
- The MaddAddam Trilogy: Started with Oryx and Crake in 2003. It’s about biotech run amok. While we were all worried about flip phones, she was worrying about "Pigoons" with human brain tissue.
- The Testaments (2019): The long-awaited sequel to Gilead. It snagged her a second Booker (shared with Bernardine Evaristo).
She calls her work "speculative fiction" rather than science fiction. Why? Because she only writes about things that could actually happen with the tech and politics we have right now. No Martians. No warp drives. Just us, being terrible to each other.
The Inventor and the Activist
Atwood isn't just sitting in a library with a quill. She’s a tech nerd. She actually invented something called the LongPen. It’s a robotic device that allows an author to sign books from thousands of miles away. She got tired of the grueling book tours and decided to automate her own signature.
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She’s also a fierce environmentalist. Her partner of decades, Graeme Gibson, was a huge bird lover, and together they became joint presidents of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club. After he passed in 2019, she continued that work. For Atwood, climate change isn't a "political" issue; it’s a survival issue.
"It’s not 'Save the Planet.' The planet will be fine. It’s 'Save the Humans.'"
She’s often seen as a feminist icon, but she’s had some friction there too. She’s a "Big Tent" feminist. She believes in due process and has occasionally irritated younger activists by insisting on nuance. She doesn't like "the bad box"—the idea that you can just put a group of people in a box and call them evil without looking at the systems that made them.
The Secretive "Book of Lives" (2025/2026)
Lately, she hasn't slowed down. Her latest major project, Book of Lives, released recently, has been making waves for its raw, memoir-style reflections. It’s less about the future and more about the ghosts of the past.
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She’s also been involved in the "Future Library" project. Back in 2014, she was the first author to contribute a manuscript to a forest in Norway. No one can read that book until the year 2114. The trees being grown now will be turned into the paper for her book in a hundred years. That is peak Margaret Atwood. Planning for a world she knows she won’t see.
What Most People Get Wrong
People think she’s a "prophet of doom." She hates that. She’s actually a "prophet of if." If we do this, then that happens. It’s a warning, not a destiny.
Also, she’s hilarious. If you follow her on Twitter (or X, or whatever we’re calling it this week), you’ll see she’s constantly posting about strange fungi, political absurdities, and her own "bad" typing. She doesn't take herself nearly as seriously as the literary world takes her. She drinks single-malt scotch, straight up. She reads The Onion.
How to Actually Read Her
If you’re new to her work, don't just stop at The Handmaid’s Tale.
- Want a mystery? Read Alias Grace. It’s based on a real 1843 murder.
- Want to feel weird about your childhood? Read Cat's Eye. It’s about the subtle cruelties of little girls.
- Want to see the end of the world? Oryx and Crake.
Margaret Atwood is basically the cool, scary aunt of global literature. She’s the one who tells you the truth about where meat comes from at the Thanksgiving table. She’s observant because she spent her childhood watching bugs and trees instead of screens.
Actionable Next Steps to Explore Atwood’s World:
- Listen to her interviews: Search for her recent talks on the MasterClass series or CBC’s Writers & Company. Her voice is as distinctive as her prose.
- Check out "Survival": If you want to understand her brain, read her 1972 nonfiction book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. It explains why so many Canadian stories are about people just trying not to die in the snow.
- Watch the documentaries: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power is the definitive film about her life. It’s on most streaming platforms and shows her traveling the world with Graeme.
- Support the Pelee Island Bird Observatory: This was a project close to her and Graeme’s hearts. It’s a practical way to engage with the environmental themes she writes about.
Atwood’s real power isn't in predicting the future. It’s in forcing us to look at the present until we finally see it for what it is.