From the author of the Governor General’s Award winner Shadow Maker and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize winner Stalin’s Daughter

More than thirty years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, international award-winning and bestselling author, continues to be a household name. Now, the TV adaptation of the novel has turned Atwood’s handmaids into a symbol around the globe. But who is Margaret Atwood? Rosemary Sullivan, award-winning biographer and poet, has penned the first portrait of Canada’s most famous novelist, a woman who helped to shatter the paradigm of the artist as exclusively male.

In Margaret Atwood: Starting Out, Rosemary Sullivan explores the trajectory of a remarkable writer’s career. She focuses on Atwood’s formative years through to the late 1970s, when the major elements of Atwood’s life—the publication of Surfacing, Power Politics, and The Edible Woman; her relationship with writer Graeme Gibson; the birth of her daughter; and her focus on Canadian culture—are set in place. A stunning blend of narrative and meditation, of discovery and insight, Margaret Atwood: Starting Out is a major portrait of one of Canada’s most provocative writers who is out ahead, throwing back clues about the pleasure and pitfalls of being human.

Previously published as Red Shoes, this retitled edition features a new preface by the author which explores the success of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, written 35 years ago and which has seen enormous popular success since being made into a TV series in 2016.

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN is an acclaimed biographer, poet and editor. She is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including Villa Air-Bel, which was awarded a Canadian Jewish Book Award; Labyrinth Of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession; By Heart: Elizabeth Smart—A Life and the #1 bestseller The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award, the Toronto Book Award and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. Sullivan’s journalistic pieces have won her a National Magazine Awards silver medal and a Western Journalism first prize for travelogue; her academic honours include Killam, Trudeau and Guggenheim fellowships. She lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

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