Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Here novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004 - 2021. Her next collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood was published in March 2023. Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Vivian Gornick is one of the world’s most distinguished and respected women writers and feminists, very much in the first person. She has written several books, including two memoirs, Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987 and 2015), the biography of feminist revolutionary Emma Goldman (Emma Goldman. Revolution as a way of life, Yale University Press, 2013) and three collections of essays, two of which, The Men in My Life (Mit Press, 2008) and The End of the Novel of Love(Beacon Press, 1998), were finalists in the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches creative writing at the New School, writes for various media, and still lives in New York. In 2017 Vivian Gornick won the prize for the Best Work of Fiction awarded by the Gremio de Libreros de Madrid for the Spanish-language version of Fierce Attachments (Apegos feroces, Sexto Piso, 2017).
Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and a longstanding columnist for The Nation, where she writes about feminism, politics, and culture. She has won many prizes and awards for her writing, including two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent book of poetry is The Mind-Body Problem; her most recent book of prose is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She lives in New York City with her husband and cat.
