Reading List

Authors Like Margaret Atwood

In the spring of 1984 Margaret Atwood was living in West Berlin, with the Wall still standing, and began a novel she wrote by hand and then typed on a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter she had rented. She set herself one rule: nothing would go into the book that had not already happened somewhere in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history. She finished it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and The Handmaid’s Tale was published in Canada on 17 April 1985. It won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award; in March 2026 Utah removed it from all its public schools. Atwood has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin (2000) and The Testaments (2019), and published Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts in November 2025. The ten writers below share her ground: women’s bodies as public property, the future built from the past, and dark jokes about power.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Speculative fiction · Women and power · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Margaret Atwood, start with Octavia E. Butler, whose Parable of the Sower (1993) imagines an America collapsing into religious and political extremism. Naomi Alderman, whom Atwood mentored, wrote The Power (2016), in which women gain the ability to hurt men, and Ursula K. Le Guin is the writer Atwood debated about what to call this kind of fiction. Further down are the classic that came before her and a Japanese novelist who turns reproduction into satire.

10 authors like Margaret Atwood

01
The first science-made monster

Mary Shelley

British · Frankenstein (1818), The Last Man (1826)

Shelley was born in London in 1797, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and died in 1851. Frankenstein, begun when she was eighteen, follows a scientist who builds a living creature and then abandons it. The Last Man imagines humanity wiped out by plague in the late twenty-first century.

The ancestor of Oryx and Crake, in which a scientist engineers a new kind of human. Shelley and Atwood both ask what a creator owes the thing he makes, and both are suspicious of men who play god.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Shelley →

02
The dystopia she answered

George Orwell

British · Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Orwell was born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, in 1903 and died in 1950. Nineteen Eighty-Four follows Winston Smith inside a state that controls language, memory and sex. When The Handmaid’s Tale appeared in 1985, reviewers called it a “feminist 1984”.

Both novels are written from inside a regime by someone keeping a forbidden record, and both end with an appendix that looks back from a later time. Orwell’s state controls what people say; Atwood’s controls what women’s bodies are for.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

03
Women’s lives, then the future

Doris Lessing

British, raised in Southern Rhodesia · The Golden Notebook (1962), The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia, in 1919, grew up in Southern Rhodesia and moved to London in 1949. The Golden Notebook follows a writer, Anna Wulf, who keeps four notebooks for the parts of her life; The Memoirs of a Survivor describes a city falling apart. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and died in 2013.

Like Atwood, Lessing moved from realist novels about women’s lives into speculative fiction, and like Atwood she resisted being made a spokeswoman for feminism. The Golden Notebook is the closest relative of Cat’s Eye and The Edible Woman.

— Lisanne

Every book by Doris Lessing →

04
The argument about labels

Ursula K. Le Guin

American · The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974)

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929 and died in 2018. The Left Hand of Darkness follows an envoy to a planet whose people have no fixed sex. Atwood has long called her own books “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction, and in 2011 she said her definition of speculative fiction matched Le Guin’s definition of science fiction.

The two most respected women writing about imagined societies in the twentieth century, and two writers who disagreed in public about what to call it. Le Guin goes further from Earth; Atwood stays closer to the news.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ursula K. Le Guin →

05
Fairy tales with teeth

Angela Carter

British · The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991)

Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and died in 1992. The Bloody Chamber retells fairy tales such as Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast from the women’s side, with the violence and desire left in.

Atwood rewrites old stories too, from Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) to The Penelopiad (2005), her retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s side. Carter is more lavish and gothic, Atwood drier, but both treat the fairy tale as a story about power.

— Lisanne

Every book by Angela Carter →

06
The dystopia that centres race

Octavia E. Butler

American · Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998)

Butler was born in Pasadena, California, in 1947 and died in 2006. Kindred sends a Black woman from 1976 back to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War. In Parable of the Talents, a Christian fundamentalist wins the presidency of a collapsing United States.

The writer on this list who complicates Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale sends Gilead’s Black citizens offstage to “National Homelands”, and critics have argued it borrows from the history of enslaved women while leaving them out. Butler puts race and slavery at the centre of the same fears.

— Lisanne
07
A calm voice inside the system

Kazuo Ishiguro

British, born in Nagasaki · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy H., who grew up at an English boarding school and slowly reveals that she and her friends were raised to donate their organs. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

Kathy, like Offred, tells her story after the fact, in a calm voice that leaves out more than it says. Both novels are about bodies used as a resource, and about how much people will accept.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

08
Her protégée’s reversal

Naomi Alderman

British · Disobedience (2006), The Power (2016), The Future (2023)

Alderman was born in London in 1974 and was mentored by Atwood through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In The Power, teenage girls discover they can give electric shocks with their hands, and the balance of power between the sexes reverses. It won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017.

The most direct descendant of The Handmaid’s Tale: a thought experiment about gender and violence, framed, as Atwood’s is, by documents from a later age. Alderman flips the question and asks whether women with power would behave any better.

— Lisanne

Every book by Naomi Alderman →

09
Canada, after the collapse

Emily St. John Mandel

Canadian · Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), Sea of Tranquility (2022)

Mandel was born in Merritt, British Columbia, in 1979. Station Eleven follows a travelling theatre company performing Shakespeare around the Great Lakes twenty years after a flu pandemic. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015 and was a National Book Award finalist.

The Canadian heir to the MaddAddam trilogy: a world ended by catastrophe, told through a few survivors and flashbacks to the time before. Mandel is gentler than Atwood and more interested in what art and memory keep alive.

— Lisanne
10
Reproduction as satire

Sayaka Murata

Japanese · Convenience Store Woman (2016), Vanishing World (2015, in English 2025)

Murata was born in Inzai, Chiba, in 1979. Convenience Store Woman, which won the Akutagawa Prize, follows a woman pressed to marry after eighteen years of shop work. In Vanishing World, children are conceived by artificial insemination and married sex is treated as incest.

Murata and Atwood both write societies that decide what women’s bodies are for, and both use deadpan comedy to make it bearable. Murata’s systems are absurd where Gilead’s are cruel, which makes her a sharp, strange companion.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sayaka Murata →

Where to start if you loved Margaret Atwood

If you loved The Handmaid’s Tale, read Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Sower: a collapsing America, and a young woman who starts a new faith.

If you loved The Testaments, read Naomi Alderman.

The Power: girls with electricity in their hands, and a world turned over.

If you loved Oryx and Crake, read Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein: the first novel about a scientist who makes a new kind of being.

If you loved Cat’s Eye, read Doris Lessing.

The Golden Notebook: one woman’s life, split into four notebooks.

If you want more Margaret Atwood, read her in three steps.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), then Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000), then the memoir Book of Lives (2025).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Margaret Atwood

Who writes like Margaret Atwood?

Octavia E. Butler, Naomi Alderman and Ursula K. Le Guin are the closest matches. Butler’s Parable of the Sower imagines an America sliding into extremism, Alderman’s The Power was written under Atwood’s mentorship, and Le Guin is the writer Atwood debated about speculative fiction.

What should I read after The Handmaid’s Tale?

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016). Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is the classic it is most often compared with.

Does Margaret Atwood have a new book?

Her most recent book is Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, published in November 2025 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Chatto & Windus in the UK. It is her first memoir.

Which Margaret Atwood book should I read first?

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is the usual starting point. Read Alias Grace (1996) if you prefer historical fiction, and The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the Booker Prize, for her most ambitious novel.

Is Margaret Atwood science fiction?

Atwood calls her futuristic novels “speculative fiction”, meaning things that could really happen, rather than science fiction. In 2011 she said her definition of speculative fiction matched Ursula K. Le Guin’s definition of science fiction.

Is Margaret Atwood like George Orwell?

The Handmaid’s Tale was called a “feminist 1984” when it appeared in 1985. Both novels are written from inside a regime and end with an appendix that looks back from a later time; Atwood’s regime is built on control of women’s bodies.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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