Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

Throughout her thirty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), which won the first Arthur C Clarke Award, The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the Booker Prize, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Penelopiad (2006). Her most recent book is The Door, a collection of poetry, and her next novel, The Year of the Flood, will be published in 2009. She has an uncanny knack for writing books that anticipate the popular preoccupations of her public.

Acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal and worldly problems of universal concern, Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than thirty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.

Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.