Celebrating Cultural Heroes

The Ronald & Nancy Kalifer Culture Hub, Baycrest

May 2024 – October 2024

Margaret Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC FRSL

Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.  Here novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy.  Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize.  In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004 - 2021.  Her next collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood was published in March 2023.  Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.  In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.  She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer.  She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Photography credit:  Luis Mora