Margaret Atwood

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 22 2008 15.39 BST

1939-

"Some part of me thought that I would always be teaching grammar to Engineering students at 8.30 in the morning. For ever."

Birthplace

Ottawa, Ontario

Education

University of Toronto, Harvard

Other jobs

Waitress, lecturer

Did you know?

The Handmaid's Tale was banned in some US high schools.

Critical verdict

A writer of impressive variety - she has done Bildungsroman (Cat's Eye), sci-fi (The Handmaid's Tale) and Victoriana (Alias Grace) - she excels in open-ended stories of the enigmatic woman. Critically feted worldwide, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and finally won it in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, a multilayered family memoir and meditation on narrative and female bondage.

Recommended works

The Handmaid's Tale ("One man was absolutely convinced that The Handmaid's Tale was autobiographical. I said, 'But it's about the future.' He said, 'You could not have written about this unless something like it had happened to you'") is required reading; Alias Grace shows a writer at the height of her powers.

Influences

Consider Her Ways, by John Wyndham, in which women are divided into breeders and leaders, is an interesting precedent to The Handmaid's Tale, and points up Atwood's sci-fi tendencies.

Now read on

There are points of contact between Atwood's early work and that of Angela Carter. Alias Grace, as a post-colonial retelling of the nineteenth-century novel, shares a mood with Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, and Sarah Waters' jail-tale, Affinity.