75 Facts About Margaret Atwood

1. Margaret Atwood achieved fame with provocative novels and challenging poems while still a young woman.

2. Margaret Atwood is a multitalented writer with a flare for sardonic humor.

3. Margaret Atwood wrote for the school paper during her teens at Leaside High School and contributed to the school magazine Clan Call.

4. Margaret Atwood held numerous patents of the LongPen technology and served as a Director of Syngrafii.

5. Margaret Atwood changed the title, partly to honor Canterbury Tales and as a nod to fairy tales.

6. Margaret Atwood wrote the book in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, while living in West Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

7. Margaret Atwood wrote the book in longhand on yellow legal notepads.

8. Margaret Atwood never explicitly states Serena Joy's age in the book, but The Commander's wife is described as having arthritis and uses a cane.

9. Margaret Atwood is from Canada, and she is an author, poet, teacher, and an environmental activist.

10. Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, journalist and activist, considered by some to be amongst the best living writers.

11. Margaret Atwood won a Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000, and in 2003, she published Oryx and Crake, one of her most intriguing explorations of the power of science.

12. Margaret Atwood has repeatedly reinvented herself over the course of her career.

13. Margaret Atwood is known for both the quality and the quantity of her writing.

14. Margaret Atwood has held positions as an English lecturer or writer-in-residence at various universities.

15. Margaret Atwood has lived in Canada for the majority of her life, but during the 1980s, she spent some time in Germany, England, and France.

16. Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

17. Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto.

18. Margaret Atwood donated the prize money to environmental and literary causes.

19. Margaret Atwood studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1962 to 1963 and from 1965 to 1967.

20. Margaret Atwood wrote the libretto for the opera Pauline, about Canadian Indian poet Pauline Johnson; it premiered at the York Theatre in Vancouver in 2014.

21. Margaret Atwood established a nonprofit organization under the title Writers' Trust of Canada.

22. In 2004, Margaret Atwood developed an idea for a device which would allow someone to "remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet.

23. Margaret Atwood studied at Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1961, obtaining her master's degree the next year.

24. Margaret Atwood has instead offered the genre "speculative fiction" to describe The Handmaid's Tale and other such books, claiming that science fiction should be used to describe space adventures or alien stories.

25. In 2006, Margaret Atwood expanded her writing talents into the realm of culinary arts, coming up with a recipe for baked lemon custard.

26. Margaret Atwood was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1981.

27. Margaret Atwood was commissioned by the City of Vancouver to write her very first chamber opera piece in 2008.

28. In 1968, Margaret Atwood married an American writer named Jim Polk.

29. Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, on November 18, 1939.

30. Margaret Atwood has had a record number of nominations for the Booker Prize.

31. Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to a nutritionist mother and entomologist father who fostered a love of nature.

32. In 2016, Margaret Atwood published the graphic novel Angel Catbird, an undertaking done with fellow Canadian artist Johnnie Christmas which profiles the super-heroic adventures of a genetic engineer who becomes part feline, part owl.

33. Margaret Atwood continued to publish poetry as well as the novels Surfacing, Lady Oracle (1976) and Life Before Man (1980).

34. Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Canada.

35. Margaret Atwood is the first author to contribute to The Future Library Project, which will take one writer's contribution each year for the next hundred years to be printed in the year 2114.

36. Margaret Atwood has contributed much to the academic discussion of the Canadian identity.

37. Margaret Atwood was first published as a poet in 1961 with her collection Double Persephone.

38. Margaret Atwood has a slew of awards and honors to her name, including the Man Booker Prize, and there's no question why.

39. Margaret Atwood is writing a sequel to her best-selling 1985 book The Handmaid's Tale.

40. Margaret Atwood said reader questions about the world of The Handmaid's Tale inspired her to revisit the story more than 30 years after the book was originally published, as did the current political climate.

41. Margaret Atwood has revealed that she is writing a sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, called The Testaments.

42. Margaret Atwood announces 'The Handmaid's Tale' sequel set 15 years after first book.

43. Margaret Atwood confirmed on Twitter that the book will be released on September 10, 2019.

44. Margaret Atwood announced Wednesday she is writing a sequel to her dark, dystopian drama "The Handmaid's Tale.

45. Margaret Atwood has announced a sequel to her bestselling feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, titled The Testaments.

46. Margaret Atwood announced her work in progress, titled The Testaments, on Twitter with a chilling video that hints of what's in store for the dystopian Republic of Gilead and its people.

47. Margaret Atwood has not revealed whether Offred—or any of the original book's characters—will be among the sequel's three narrators.

48. Margaret Atwood is writing a sequel to her novel The Handmaid's Tale, inspired by the state of the modern world.

49. Margaret Atwood reveals she is writing a 'Handmaid's Tale' sequel.

50. Margaret Atwood is currently writing a sequel to her best-selling dystopian novel, "The Handmaid's Tale", it was announced Wednesday.

51. Margaret Atwood confirmed the news to excited fans in a tweet Wednesday morning.

52. Margaret Atwood revealed the news in a tweet Wednesday morning and said the book is set to be published next year.

53. Margaret Atwood announced Wednesday that a sequel to her iconic 1985 novel, "The Handmaid's Tale", is coming next year.

54. Margaret Atwood announces 'Handmaid's Tale' sequel to be released in 2019.

55. Margaret Atwood is working on a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale", the most popular and influential feminist novel ever written.

56. Margaret Atwood is returning to the Republic of Gilead with "The Testaments", a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale.

57. Margaret Atwood appears in a cameo in the first episode as one of the Aunts at the Red Center.

58. Margaret Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.

59. Margaret Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, and she and Graeme Gibson are the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International.

60. Margaret Atwood has indicated in interviews that she considers herself a Red Tory in the historical sense of the term.

61. Margaret Atwood repeatedly makes observations about the relationship of humans to animals in her works.

62. Margaret Atwood continued her exploration of the implications of Canadian literary themes for Canadian identity in lectures such as Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature.

63. In 2016 Margaret Atwood began writing the superhero comic book series Angel Catbird, with co-creator and illustrator Johnnie Christmas.

64. In March 2008, Margaret Atwood accepted her first chamber opera commission.

65. In 2008 Margaret Atwood published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a collection of five lectures delivered as part of the Massey Lectures from October 12 to November 1, 2008.

66. On November 28, 2018 Margaret Atwood announced that she will publish The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, in September 2019.

67. In 2005 Margaret Atwood published the novella The Penelopiad as part of the Canongate Myth Series.

68. In 2001, Margaret Atwood was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.

69. In 2000 Margaret Atwood published her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, to critical acclaim, winning both the Booker Prize and the Hammett Prize in 2000.

70. In 1977 Margaret Atwood published her first short story collection, Dancing Girls, which was the winner of the St Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction.

71. Margaret Atwood published three novels during this time: Surfacing; Lady Oracle (1976); and Life Before Man (1979), which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.

72. In 1961 Margaret Atwood began graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.

73. Margaret Atwood realized she wanted to write professionally when she was sixteen.

74. Margaret Atwood began writing plays and poems at the age of six.

75. Margaret Atwood is the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents.