Margaret Atwood books in order(complete list), her biography and her most famous work

Margaret Atwood books in order of release year

Very few authors could create a legacy that Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author popular for her novels The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale has created.

Her writing brought such out-of-the-box stories to the world from a critical feminist perspective that not only her novels have been celebrated but they have been adapted into series and movies.

In this blog post, bx-zone.com brings you Margaret Atwood’s books list, a complete list of Margaret Atwood books in order of release.

Margaret Atwood books in order (The Handmaid’s Tale series)

  • The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
  • The Testaments (2019)

Margaret Atwood books in order (The MaddAddam Trilogy)

  • Oryx and Crake (2003)
  • The Year of the Flood (2009)
  • Maddaddam (2013)

Margaret Atwood novels in order

  • The Edible Woman (1969)
  • Surfacing (1972)
  • Lady Oracle (1976)
  • Up in the Tree (1978)
  • Life before Man (1979)
  • Bodily Harm (1981)
  • Unearthing Suite (1983)
  • The Labrador Fiasco (1986)
  • Cat's Eye (1988)
  • For the Birds (1990) (with Shelly Tanaka)
  • The Robber Bride (1993)
  • Alias Grace (1996)
  • The Blind Assassin (2000)
  • The Heart Goes Last (2015)
  • Fourteen Days (2023)

Poems by Margaret Atwood (Collections) in order

  • Double Persephone (1961)
  • The Circle Game (poems) (1967)
  • The Animals in That Country (poems) (1968)
  • The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poems) (1970)
  • Procedures for Underground (1970)
  • Power Politics (poems) (1971)
  • You Are Happy (poems) (1974)
  • Selected Poems (poems) (1976)
  • Dancing Girls (1977)
  • Two-Headed Poems (poems) (1978)
  • True Stories (1981)
  • Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
  • Murder in the Dark (poems) (1983)
  • Interlunar (poems) (1984)
  • Selected Poems II (poems) (1986)
  • Poems 1965-1975 (poems) (1987)
  • Wilderness Tips (1991)
  • Poems 1976-1986 (poems) (1992)
  • Good Bones (1992)
  • Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)
  • Morning in the Burned House (poems) (1995)
  • Bones and Murder (1995)
  • Ten (1996)
  • Eating Fire (poems) (1998)
  • The Tent (2006)
  • Moral Disorder (2006)
  • The Door (poems) (2007)
  • Hymns of the God's Gardeners (poems) (2009)
  • Crimespotting (2009)
  • I'm with the Bears (2011)
  • Stone Mattress (2014)
  • The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie (poems) (2014)
  • The Blind Assassin / The Handmaid's Tale / The Robber Bride / Alias Grace (2016)
  • A Trio of Tolerable Tales (2017)
  • Freedom (2018)
  • Dearly (poems) (2020)
  • Old Babes in the Wood (2023)
  • Furies (2023)
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Margaret Atwood short stories in order

  • When it Happens (1983)
  • Freeforall(1986)
  • Homelanding(1989)
  • Daphne and Laura and So Forth(1995)
  • Half-Hanged Mary(1995)
  • Shopping(1998)
  • Old Babes in the Wood (2023)

Margaret Atwood Picture/Graphic books in order

  • Anna's Pet (1980) (with Joyce Barkhouse)
  • Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
  • Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
  • Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)
  • Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery (2011)

Margaret Atwood non-fiction books in order

  • Survival (1972)
  • Days Of The Rebel (1977)
  • Second Words (1982)
  • Strange Things (1995)
  • On Writers and Writing (2002)
  • Moving Targets (2004)
  • Writing with Intent (2005)
  • Curious Pursuits (2005)
  • Waltzing Again (2006)
  • Payback (2007)
  • Glances at Germany, Poland, and the Euxine (2009)
  • In Other Worlds (2011)
  • The World Split Open (2014) (with Edward P Jones, Ursula K Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson and Wallace Stegner)
  • Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia and The Handmaid's Tale (2015)
  • The Burgess Shale (2017)
  • Burning Questions (2022)

Margaret Atwood novellas in order of publication

  • Death by Landscape (1989)
  • Moral Disorder: A Story (2014)
  • The Bad News (2018)
  • My Evil Mother (2022)

Omnibus

The Margaret Atwood Omnibus (1987)

Chapbooks

Bottle (2004)

Margaret Atwood anthologies

  • First Words (1993)
  • The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993)
  • The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1995)
  • Virtually Now (1996)
  • The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Ninth Annual Collection (1996)
  • Wild Women (1997)
  • Mistresses of the Dark (1998)

Anthologies edited by Margaret Atwood

  • The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1982)
  • The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1987) (with Robert Weaver)
  • The Canlit Foodbook (1987)

Contributions

  • Best American Short Stories (1989) with Shannon Ravenel
  • The Penelopiad (2005)
  • The Myths Volume I - VI (omnibus) (2006) with David Grossman, Victor Pelevin and Jeanette Winterson
  • The Myths Series Collection 1-3 (omnibus) (2016) with Karen Armstrong and Jeanette Winterson
  • Hag-Seed(2016)

Who is Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood didn’t attend school full-time till she was 12 but started writing at 6.

A decade later, when she turned 16, Atwood realized she wanted to be a professional writer.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer - well associating only the word ‘writer’ with her will be highly unfair because she is a fantastic poet who has published 18 books of poetry, a brilliant novelist with 18 novels tagged to her name, an essayist, a literary critic, an activist too and a more importantly a professor.

Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada - the second of the three children of an entomologist father and a dietician mother.

Because of her father’s work, Atwood spent much of her childhood shuttling back and forth between the woods where her father worked, Ottawa, and Toronto.

Atwood graduated high school in 1957 and then obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1961. In 1962, Margaret Atwood post-graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Radcliff College of Harvard University.

Atwood began her career as a writer by publishing poetry collections. Her first poetry book was Double Persephone which was published as a pamphlet in 1961.

A few years later she published her second poetry collection The Circle Game which won the Governor’s General award.

After publishing a few more poetry collections in the 60s, Atwood published her first novel The Edible Woman in 1969 which had a completely different theme of a woman distancing herself from food as a means of showing rebellion against the male dominion.

The 70s was the decade when Atwood rose to fame as a writer. Margaret Atwood published her first short story collection Dancing Girls in 1977. In addition, she also released 3 novels between 1972 and 1979 - Surfacing,Lady Oracle & Life Before Man.

But Atwood didn’t restrict herself to only novels and short story collections - she also published six story collections during the decade between 1970 and 1978.

She started getting so popular in the mid-70s that Maclean’s, a prominent Canadian magazine termed her ‘Canada’s most gossiped writer’.

A decade later in the 80s, awards started coming to the writer Margaret Atwood.

Her novel The Handmade’s Tale won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Governor General’s Award.

1988 released novel Cat’s Eye made it as a finalist for the 1988 Governor General’s Award as well as the 1989 Booker Prize.

Atwood’s fame continued to grow with her 1993 novel The Robber Bride and 1996 novel Alias Grace both of which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award.

Alias Grace even made it as the finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize and won the Giller Prize in 1996. Both novels had females as the villain characters.

The Booker Prize finally came to Atwood in the year 2000 when her critically acclaimed novel The Blind Assassin won it along with the Hammett Prize in the same year.

Atwood in 2003 released the novel titled Oryx and Crake which was the first book of the novel series that went to be known as the MaddAddam Trilogy.

The MaddAddam Trilogy had a dystopian society created by genetic modification and man-made plague as its theme in which the humans that are left need to fight to live.

Atwood married American writer Jim Polk in 1968 but the couple divorced in 1973. Margaret Atwood then met novelist Graeme Gibson with whom she moved to a farm in Ontario.

The couple’s daughter, Eleanor Gibson was born in 1978.

Atwood and Gibson were together until Gibson died of dementia in 2019.

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How many books has Margaret Atwood written?

Margaret Atwood has written 18 poetry collections, 17 novels,11 non-fiction books, 9 short fiction books, 8 children’s books, 3 picture books, and various small press editions involving poetry, fiction, television scripts, Radio scripts, recordings and theatre.

What is Margaret Atwood’s most famous work?

The novel The Handmaid’s Tale released in 1985 is the most popular work of Margaret Atwood.

Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel whose central theme is the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.

The Republic of Gilead is a patriarchal, totalitarian state that is set in future New England. It has already overthrown the US government.

In this state, women are forced to reproduce for the ruling class of the state known as ‘The Commanders’. The novel explores the theme of suppressed women in a patriarchal society, loss of their individuality, forced reproduction, and also their fight to gain their rights and individuality.

The Handmaid’s Tale won the Governor’s General Award in 1985 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.

This novel was also nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize, 1986 Nebula Award and 1987 Prometheus Award.

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Conclusion: Margaret Atwood books in order

Alright, this was the complete exhaustive list of Margaret Atwood books in order of publication categorized into various sections.

I am sure you must be feeling itchy about getting your hands on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ or ‘The Edible Woman’ and why not? They are such brilliantly written stories.

Tell me have you already read these 2 novels or not?

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