Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood writes the kind of speculative fiction that doesn’t feel speculative for long. Gilead, Oryx and Crake’s bioengineered collapse, the surveillance and control running through her near-future worlds — none of it reads as fantasy, because she builds every extrapolation out of something already happening. She works across genres without ever losing her literary precision: dystopia, myth retelling, historical murder mystery, psychological character study. What holds it together is a feminist clarity about power — who has it, who doesn’t, and what that does to the people on both sides. If that combination is what draws you to her, here are ten authors who deliver some version of the same unease and the same intelligence.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Speculative Fiction · Dystopia · Feminist Literature · Updated June 2026
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin wrote across science fiction, fantasy, and essays with a consistent interest in how invented societies reveal something true about gender, politics, and identity. The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a society without fixed gender to interrogate how deeply gender shapes everything else about human relationships — exactly the kind of thought experiment Atwood runs throughout her own speculative work.
Le Guin is the most frequently cited match for Atwood, and for good reason: both writers treat speculative fiction as a serious philosophical tool rather than an escape from reality. If you love how Atwood uses an invented world to expose something real, start here.
Octavia Butler
Butler used speculative and science fiction to examine race, power, and survival with unflinching clarity. Parable of the Sower imagines a near-future America in social and ecological collapse — a premise that reads, like much of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, as alarmingly extrapolated from the present rather than invented from nothing.
Fans of the MaddAddam trilogy specifically should go to Butler next. Both writers build collapse scenarios that feel uncomfortably plausible, and both use the genre to interrogate who survives a crisis and why.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro writes speculative fiction with the restraint of literary fiction — Never Let Me Go examines questions of ethics, humanity, and what we owe each other through a quietly devastating alternate reality that never raises its voice. The horror is in what’s implied, not what’s shown.
If what you love in Atwood is the literary control rather than the genre trappings — speculative premises handled with total seriousness and restraint — Ishiguro is the closest match in tone.
Naomi Alderman
Alderman’s The Power — a novel in which teenage girls worldwide suddenly develop the ability to inflict pain at will, inverting the global gender power balance overnight — was written under Atwood’s direct mentorship. Atwood herself called it “electrifying.”
This is the most direct lineage on the list. Alderman takes Atwood’s central preoccupation — what happens when one group holds total power over another’s body — and runs the experiment in reverse.
Angela Carter
Carter rewrote fairy tales and myths through a feminist lens, giving traditionally passive female characters agency, desire, and danger of their own. The Bloody Chamber reanimates familiar stories with a vivid, unsettling intensity that exposes what the original versions left out.
Atwood does this same work in The Penelopiad, retelling the Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view. If that reclamation of myth is what you want more of, Carter is the foundational text.
Marge Piercy
Piercy combines realistic characters with speculative scenarios and direct political commentary on gender, feminism, and social progress. Woman on the Edge of Time — about a woman unjustly committed to a mental institution who experiences visions of a utopian future — is often discussed alongside The Handmaid’s Tale as a foundational feminist dystopia.
Piercy’s blend of grounded realism with speculative scenario is structurally close to how Atwood builds her own near-future worlds out of recognisable institutions and injustices.
Alice Munro
Munro, a fellow Canadian and Nobel laureate, wrote short fiction of extraordinary psychological precision, examining the complexity of ordinary lives and relationships with an unsparing eye. Her work shares none of Atwood’s genre-bending but all of her interest in what people actually do to each other inside families and marriages.
For readers drawn to Atwood’s character-driven literary fiction — Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride — rather than her speculative work, Munro offers that same psychological sharpness in short-story form.
N.K. Jemisin
Jemisin builds intricate speculative worlds to examine systemic injustice, identity, and power. The Fifth Season is set in a world shaped by recurring geological catastrophe, where oppressive social structures are revealed through complex, fully realised characters rather than simple allegory.
Jemisin shares Atwood’s commitment to building a speculative world detailed enough that its injustices feel structural rather than invented — exactly the quality that makes Gilead so unsettling.
George Orwell
Orwell’s clear, direct prose critiques political oppression, propaganda, and the mechanics of authoritarian control. 1984 remains the genre’s foundational text on surveillance and the loss of personal and political freedom — territory Atwood has named as a direct influence on her own dystopian writing.
Atwood has cited Orwell explicitly as formative to her own thinking about dystopia. If you want to read the book that the genre’s politics are built on, this is where Atwood herself started.
Yoko Ogawa
Ogawa has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction since 1988, often featuring complicated female characters reckoning with identity, memory, and self-expression inside quietly unsettling premises. The Memory Police imagines an island where objects, and eventually concepts, simply vanish from collective memory.
Ogawa’s prolific range across genres and her gift for unsettling, dystopian premises grounded in interior female experience put her in direct conversation with Atwood’s own range and preoccupations.
Where to start if you loved Margaret Atwood
If you loved The Handmaid’s Tale, then…
Read Naomi Alderman. The Power was written under Atwood’s own mentorship and inverts the same question about total power over the body.
If you loved Oryx and Crake, then…
Read Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower builds the same kind of uncomfortably plausible ecological and social collapse.
If you loved The Penelopiad, then…
Read Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber is the foundational text for reclaiming myth and fairy tale through a feminist lens.
If you loved Cat’s Eye, then…
Read Alice Munro. Same psychological precision about ordinary relationships, from a fellow Canadian, in short-story form.
If you loved the literary restraint, then…
Read Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go handles a speculative premise with the same quiet, unraised-voice devastation.
If you want the genre’s political roots, then…
Read George Orwell. Atwood has named 1984 as directly formative to her own dystopian thinking.
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