A winner of many international literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General’s Award, the PEN Pinter Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction. In 2017, she will receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Her non-fiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, was made into a documentary. Her recent novel, MadAddam (the third novel in the Oryx and Crake trilogy), has received rave reviews: “An extraordinary achievement” (The Independent); “A fitting and joyous conclusion” (The New York Times). The trilogy is being adapted into an HBO TV series by celebrated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. Atwood’s most recent collection of short stories is Stone Mattress. Her most recent work is Hag-Seed, a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
 
Atwood’s work has been published in more than 40 languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004, she co-invented the LongPen, a remote signing device that allows someone to write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the internet. She is a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada and a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also a popular personality on Twitter, with over a million followers.

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.

Contact Info: Rebecca Brown, rrbrown1@crimson.ua.edu, 3305031675