Margaret Eleanor Atwood CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.[2] She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.[3] Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.[4]

Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents.[5] She is the Co-Founder and Director of Syngrafii Inc. (formerly Unotchit Inc.), a company that she started in 2004 to develop, produce and distribute the LongPen technology.[6] She holds various patents related to the LongPen technologies.[7]

While she is better-known as a novelist, she has published around fifteen books of poetry.[8][9] Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age.[10] Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.

Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.