As an adolescent, Atwood divided her time between Toronto, her family's primary residence, and the sparsely settled bush country in northern Canada, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research. She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. After completing her university studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Atwood earned a master's degree in English literature from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., in 1962.

Other novels by Atwood include the surreal The Edible Woman (1969); Surfacing (1972), an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture that centres on a woman's return to her childhood home in the northern wilderness of Quebec; Lady Oracle (1976); Cat's Eye (1988); The Robber Bride (1993; filmed for television 2007); and Alias Grace (1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood described a plague-induced apocalypse in the near future through the observations and flashbacks of a protagonist who is possibly the event's sole survivor. Her 2005 novel, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, was inspired by Homer's Odyssey. Atwood also wrote a number of short-story collections and nonfiction works, including Payback (2008), an impassioned essay that treats debt—both personal and governmental—as a cultural issue rather than as a political or economic one. Atwood taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities.