Margaret Atwood

A paragon of speculative and dystopian fiction, she is one of the world’s best-known figures in contemporary literature. She spent a considerable part of her childhood in the forests of the north of Canada and has been a devoted reader of mystery novels and comics from an early age. With a degree in English Philology from the University of Toronto, she taught at several Canadian universities in the 1960s and 1970s, until she could make a living from full-time writing. She has written more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, children’s fiction, and graphic novels, some of which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Notable in her extensive list of prize-winning works are the novel El conte de la serventa (Quaderns Crema, 2018 and Salamandra, 2017, in English, The Handmaid’s Tale), which was published in 1985 and adapted for television with extensive media coverage; Àlies Grace (Quaderns Crema 2019, Salamandra 2017; in English Alias Grace); L’Assassi cec (Proa, 2001 and Ediciones B, 2001; in English, The Blind Assassin); L’any del Diluvi (Bromera, 2010 and Bruguera, 2010; in English, The Year of the Flood); Nada se acaba (Lumen, 2015; in English Life before Man); and the poetry collections Política de poder (Lleonard Muntaner, 2019; in English, Power Poltics); and L’alè misteriós (Edicions 1984, 2020). In her novels Atwood creates worlds based on the authoritarian instinct and patriarchal repression that have dominated part of western history, in order to ponder possible futures and, as a result, her work has become a reference for feminist movements around the world. She has received numerous prizes including the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and, moreover, for some time now her name has regularly featured among those of candidates for the Nobel prize for Literature. Her most recent book, Els testaments (Quaderns Crema, 2020 and Salamandra, 2019; in English, The Testaments), was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, which is awarded each year to the best novel written in English.