Margaret Atwood
b. 1939
About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic widely regarded as one of the most important living authors in the English language. Born in Ottawa and raised partly in the northern Ontario wilderness, she studied at Victoria University and Radcliffe College. Her breakthrough novel *The Edible Woman* (1969) announced her feminist preoccupations; *The Handmaid's Tale* (1985) — a dystopian novel about a theocratic patriarchy — became her most internationally known work, reinvigorated by the 2017 Hulu adaptation during the Trump era.
She has won the Booker Prize twice — for *The Blind Assassin* (2000) and *The Testaments* (2019). She has published more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, and remains an outspoken public voice on environmental collapse, authoritarianism, and gender politics.
“War is what happens when language fails.”
Quick Facts
- Born
- 1939
- Age
- 87 years
- Domain
- inspiration
- Quotes
- 5 collected
- Key Themes
- ConflictResilienceLegacyWordsChange
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Wikipedia — Margaret AtwoodMargaret Atwood's Famous Quotes
5 quotes
“War is what happens when language fails.”
— Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
— The Handmaid's Tale (1985) — mock-Latin "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum"
“In the end, we'll all become stories.”
— Various interviews; this formulation widely attributed from the 1980s onward
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
— "Spelling" poem from True Stories (1981)
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”
— The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
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Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) is an Indian author and activist whose debut novel *The God of Small Things* (1997) won the Booker Prize and sold more than eight million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling novels ever by a non-expatriate Indian author. Born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, Roy trained as an architect before writing her debut. After its success, she turned primarily to political essays — opposing nuclear testing, the Narmada Dam displacement, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — collected in *The Algebra of Infinite Justice* (2002) and *Listening to Grasshoppers* (2009). Her second novel, *The Ministry of Utmost Happiness* (2017), arrived twenty years after her first. She remains one of India's most fearless public intellectuals.
Mo Yan
Mo Yan (born 1955) is a Chinese author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, cited for his "hallucinatory realism" that "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." Born Guan Moye in Gaomi, Shandong — a rural area that becomes the setting of much of his fiction — he left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in the fields, then served in the People's Liberation Army. His international reputation was established by *Red Sorghum* (1987), a visceral novel of wartime Shandong that was adapted into a Zhang Yimou film. His subsequent novels — *The Republic of Wine* (1992), *Big Breasts and Wide Hips* (1995), and *Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out* (2006) — blend Chinese folklore, Rabelaisian excess, and political critique. The Nobel Prize generated controversy because of his silence on the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, but he remains the most internationally recognized Chinese author.
Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle is a renowned spiritual teacher and author, best known for his books "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth." His teachings focus on the importance of presence, mindfulness, and awakening to one's true self. Tolle's work has inspired millions to live more consciously and find peace in the present moment.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose seven-volume autobiography, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), transformed American literature. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, she endured a childhood marked by racial segregation, sexual trauma, and years of voluntary muteness. She became a dancer, singer, actress, journalist, playwright, and eventually one of the most celebrated poets in American history. In 1993 she delivered her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Her work is inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement — she was a close friend and collaborator of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Frequently Asked Questions
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic widely regarded as one of the most important living authors in the English language. Born in Ottawa and raised partly in the northern Ontario wilderness, she studied at Victoria University and Radcliffe College. Her breakthrough novel *The Edible Woman* (1969) announced her feminist preoccupations; *The Handmaid's Tale* (1985) — a dystopian novel about a theocratic patriarchy — became her most internationally known work, reinvigorated by the 2017 Hulu adaptation during the Trump era. She has won the Booker Prize twice — for *The Blind Assassin* (2000) and *The Testaments* (2019). She has published more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, and remains an outspoken public voice on environmental collapse, authoritarianism, and gender politics. Margaret Atwood lived b. 1939.