From her pursuit of a demanding writing schedule, Atwood was elected chair of the Canadian Writers' Union and reaped an astounding list of awards and accolades — the Bess Hoskins Prize, Union Poetry Prize, City of Toronto Book Award, St. Lawrence Award for Fiction, Periodical Distributors of Canada Short Fiction Award, and the Canadian Bookseller's Association Award. Her most provocative novels and short stories focus on themes of exploitation and victimization. One of her children's books, Up in the Tree (1978), is dedicated to Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, her daughter, who was born in May 1976. A second book for young readers, Anna's Pet (1980), Atwood wrote in collaboration with Ann Blades.
Chief among Atwood's studies of people — mainly women — who refuse to be sexual or political pawns is her dystopian feminist fable, The Handmaid's Tale, a futuristic satire that sold over a million paperback copies in the United States alone. The novel, which has been translated into twenty languages for distribution in twenty-five countries, remained on the bestseller list for twenty-three weeks, and won her the Los Angeles Times Book Award, a second Governor-General's Award, nomination to the Ritz-Paris Hemingway Prize, and the title of Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year. Subsequent honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Welsh Arts Council International Writer's Prize, and Chatelaine magazine's Woman of the Year. In 1990, The Handmaid's Tale was filmed by Cinecom Entertainment Group. The movie, scripted by Harold Pinter and set in a grim New England stronghold, features Natasha Richardson as Offred, Aidan Quinn as Nick, and Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway as Commander Fred and Serena Joy.
