Atwood received the Peace Prize in 2017, and has been awarded the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Atwood’s most recent novel, The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was published in 2019. In 2016, Hag-Seed, a novel visitation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Angel Catbird, a graphic novel co-written with Johnnie Christmas, were published. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her most recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). The Door is her latest volume of poetry (2007). Recent novels include the MaddAddam trilogy: the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). Her novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale – now a critically acclaimed television series – and The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, graphic novels and critical essays.

In a foreword specially commissioned for our edition, Atwood returns to the novel she wrote more than 15 years ago, and to the questions it raised – ones that remain equally pertinent today: ‘How slippery is the slope? … Who’s got the will to stop us?’ There are no answers, she concludes, but her prophetic tale creeps dangerously closer to reality as the years pass. Using a carefully selected pastel palette, award-winning illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion has produced a series of quietly unsettling artworks that convey societal collapse with an eerie sense of detachment, while the binding design reflects the scientific foundation of Atwood’s narrative. Following The Folio Society’s gorgeous and much-admired edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, this new volume sizzles with the dangerous heat and underlying menace of a ravaged America. Shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange prizes, Margaret Atwood’s novel – a prophetic tale of a human race all but wiped out by plague – is threaded with dark humour. ‘Saturated in science, the novel is simultaneously alive with literary resonances … superlatively gripping and remarkably imagined’

Oryx book