Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, and essayist born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, who writes in both English and French.

Her publishing career began in 1961 and has since produced a body of work remarkable in its breadth: eighteen novels, eighteen collections of poetry, nine collections of short fiction, eleven books of nonfiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels. That range across forms — from science fiction to literary criticism, from children's literature to the essay — marks her as a writer who has worked with sustained productivity across multiple modes. Notable among her novels are The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Bodily Harm, Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed, alongside story collections such as Dancing Girls and Other Stories and Stone Mattress: Nine Tales.

Her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale stands as her most widely cited work. Her awards include the Booker Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Princess of Asturias Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Trillium Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Order of Ontario, and a place on Canada's Walk of Fame. Atwood is also credited as an inventor, a designation that sits alongside her literary roles and reflects the varied character of her public engagements. Her work as a pedagogue further extends her presence beyond the page, placing her in ongoing relationship with readers and students alike.

Across her career, the registers of science fiction, dystopia, and literary criticism recur as persistent coordinates in her output, with titles such as Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid's Tale anchoring her sustained engagement with speculative and cautionary modes of storytelling.