Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids": women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
Bunny is a colloquial term for a rabbit.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Oryx and Crake is a 2003 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She has described the novel as speculative fiction and adventure romance, rather than pure science fiction, because it does not deal with things "we can't yet do or begin to do", yet goes beyond the amount of realism she associates with the novel form. It focuses on a lone character called Snowman, who finds himself in a bleak situation with only creatures called Crakers to keep him company. The reader learns of his past, as a boy called Jimmy, and of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering that occurred under the purview of Jimmy's peer, Glenn "Crake".
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
Susan Swan is a Canadian author, journalist, and professor. Susan Swan writes classic Canadian novels. Her fiction has been published in 20 countries and translated into 10 languages. She is the co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction which is open to Canadian and American women fiction writers and received an Order of Canada in 2023 for her mentoring of younger women writers.
Patricia Nell Warren, also known by her pen name Patricia Kilina, was an American novelist, poet, editor and journalist. Her second novel, The Front Runner (1974), was the first work of contemporary gay fiction to make the New York Times Best Seller list. Her third novel, The Fancy Dancer (1976), was the first bestseller to portray a gay priest and to explore gay life in a small town.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Family Chao (2022) and short story collection Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Rebecca Margot Godfrey was a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer.
Celia Brayfield is an English author, academic and cultural commentator.
Samantha Harvey is an English novelist. She is the author of several critically acclaimed novels and has been shortlisted for various literary prizes.
Alissa Nutting is an American author, creative writing professor and television writer. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB and the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.
Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier logged 1,000 volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she has twice been named a discipline winner/fellowship finalist by the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and appears widely in journals and newspapers including Cleaver,Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poets and Writers. From 2015 - 2020, she wrote the "U-Curve" and “Intersections” columns for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.
Ellis Avery was an American writer. She won two Stonewall Book Awards, one in 2008 for her debut novel The Teahouse Fire and one in 2013 for her second novel The Last Nude. The Teahouse Fire also won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction and an Ohioana Library Fiction Award in 2007. She self-published her memoir, The Family Tooth, in 2015. Her final book, Tree of Cats, was independently published posthumously. An out lesbian, she is survived by her spouse, Sharon Marcus.
Mona Awad is a Canadian novelist and short story writer known for works of darkly comic fiction.
Charlotte Pence Bond is an American writer who is the second child and elder daughter of former Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence and former Second Lady of the United States, Karen Pence.
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.
Julie Schumacher is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and academic. She is a Regents Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota. Schumacher specializes in creative writing, contemporary fiction, and children's literature.
