Margaret Atwood

Although Margaret Atwood never considered herself a science fiction genre writer, her novel The Handmaid's Tale, is one of the best feminist science fiction works to date.

Atwood has written fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children's books, television scripts, and even a play: an adaptation of her novella The Penelopiad (2005). Her prolific body of work reflects her interest in fantasy, mythology, speculative futures, feminism, Canadian identity, environmentalism, and political action.

It wasn't until 1985 that Atwood became known for her science fiction writing. The publication of her novel The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian tale set in a world where declining birth rates have condemned fertile women to enslavement, won both the Governor General's Award in Canada and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award.

In 2003, Atwood published Oryx and Crake, the first novel in a series set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where a natural disaster has obliterated most of human life. The other novels in the series are The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). In 2015, Atwood was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society.