One of the Toronto Star’s 25 books to read this season • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books and Top 100 Books of 2024
An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age.

Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume.

In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. “How can one live with such a heart?” Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the reader and ferrying us through life, death, and whatever comes next. Atwood, in her journey through poetry, illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears.

Spanning six decades of work—from her earliest beginnings to brand-new poems—this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

One of the Toronto Star’s 25 books to read this season • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books and Top 100 Books of 2024

PRAISE FOR MARGARET ATWOOD'S POETRY:

“Atwood’s poems are short, glistening with terse bright images, un-tentative, closing like a vise. These are all formed perfections.”
—New York Times
“Margaret Atwood is best known, of course, as a novelist. But she brings to her poetry the same sharp eye and stinging wit.”
—Washington Post

“Atwood is always vital, powerful, magnetically readable. . . . Readers who know only her novels really owe it to themselves to read her poems.”
—Booklist
“Margaret Atwood brings all the violence of mythology into the present world . . . She is the quiet Mata Hari, the mysterious, violent figure. . . . who pits herself against the ordered, too-clean world like an arsonist.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The Canadian Forum
“Margaret Atwood writes pieces that invent memory for the reader; the duration and the delicate resonance of her remains in the mind as natural things.”
—John Newlove