Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, but she spent much of her childhood in the forests of northern Quebec and Ontario, where her father, an entomologist, studied insects. The family lived for months at a time far from towns, without electricity, and she did not go to school full-time until she was nearly a teenager. She read everything she could find, from fairy tales to comic books, and she decided at sixteen that she would be a writer.

She studied at the University of Toronto, where one of her teachers was the critic Northrop Frye, and then at Harvard. Her first important book was poetry: The Circle Game (1966) won Canada’s Governor General’s Award. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, followed in 1969, about a young woman who, after getting engaged, finds herself unable to eat. In 1972 she published Survival, a short, bold book about Canadian literature that argued it was haunted by the struggle simply to stay alive. It was hugely influential in a country that was just starting to take its own writers seriously.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) imagines a near-future America, renamed Gilead, where a theocratic regime has seized power and fertile women are forced to bear children for the ruling class. Atwood began writing it in West Berlin in 1984, on a rented typewriter. She set herself a rule: nothing would happen in Gilead that human beings had not already done somewhere, at some time. The book became a classic, and later a television series, and the red cloak and white bonnet of its handmaids became a symbol at protests around the world.

She has been astonishingly productive, writing more than fifty books: novels, poetry, stories, criticism and children’s books. She has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, in 2019.

She also invented a device for signing books from a distance, and in 2014 she became the first writer to contribute to the Future Library in Oslo, a project in which a new manuscript is locked away each year, unread, to be printed in 2114 on paper from a forest planted for the purpose.