Do we like Margaret Atwood?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades on the right side of book bans, birds and authoritarianism, held back by one stoush over the Galloway case that plenty of feminists dislike.
Atwood is the Canadian writer behind The Handmaid's Tale (1985), who also wrote The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake. She studied at the University of Toronto and Radcliffe, and has alternated between poetry and prose for six decades. Her 2025 memoir, Book of Lives, runs to about 600 pages, and she is now in her mid-eighties.
The Galloway affair is the stoush that follows her around. In 2016 she signed an open letter calling for an investigation into how UBC handled the firing of author Steven Galloway, who faced alleged sexual assault accusations. In a 2018 Globe and Mail essay she compared the process to the Salem witch trials and argued that guilt by accusation was dangerous. Critics called it 'bad feminism'; she says it was about fair process, and she has not apologised.
That fight is live again. Galloway is suing a number of people for defamation, accusing them of publishing unproven allegations, and at the Toronto event Atwood cited Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She said Canadian media had been reluctant to cover the case. The article carried no response from the defendants, so you only get half the story there, and no court has ruled yet.
On the harm test, nothing turned up where she campaigned against any group. In a 2022 Guardian interview she was pressed repeatedly on trans rights; she said it was untrue there are no trans people, described sex as a spectrum, and refused to be drawn into a debate. Some read that as dodging and others as quite reasonably declining a loaded question, and the record we found goes no further.
On the bigger stuff she's reliably on the side of the angels. She fronted a satirical short story against a proposed Canadian provincial book ban in 2025, and in 2026 she told a University of Arkansas crowd that book bans are a worry while saying 'we all have our line'. On 60 Minutes she called the United States' direction toward totalitarianism concerning, and said she gets more heat from the left than the right.
The good stuff is real. In September she donated $1 million to Western University for a Graeme Gibson Chair in Avian Biology, and she and Gibson co-founded the Pelee Island Bird Observatory in 2003. 'Birds are the canaries in the coal mine,' she said. Bird conservation has been a lifelong cause for her, not a photo opportunity.