Though Atwood's subject matter may vary from book to book, the careful craftsmanship of her language—she is also a renowned poet—gives her considerable body of work a sensibility and resonance all its own. She is the rare writer whose books are adored by the public, acclaimed by the major critics, and studied on university and college campuses. Those books include The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, and Alias Grace.

In 2000, Atwood won the prestigious Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, a book in which, according to John Updike, "scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous." Her latest releases are Oryx and Crake, a dark and witty look at ecological disaster; The Penelopiad, a dazzling first-person retelling of the myth of Penelope, from Homer's Odyssey; The Tent, a new collection of mini fictions; and Moral Disorder, a novel-in-short-stories, which explores a single family over the course of 60 years.

Atwood's books have been translated into over thirty languages, and she has received many international awards, including The Giller Prize and The Governors General's Award from Canada; The Booker Prize and The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence from the UK; The Dashiell Hammett Award from The United States; and the Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre de Arts et Les Lettres from France. This October, Everyman's Library released a special 20th anniversary edition of her classic novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood lives and writes in Toronto.

Any talk by Margaret Atwood is always a big occasion, drawing large crowds of public readers and academics alike. Atwood travels the world to give speeches on a wide range of issues relating to literature, the creative process, the artist in society, and the modern novel. As a speaker, her pithy observations and comments, delivered in her distinctive style, resonate, move, and enlighten her audiences. Noted for her ability to both entertain and challenge an audience to think critically about our relationship to words and language, she is the perfect choice for major lecture series, artist-in-residence programs, as well as creative writing programs.