Booker Prize 2000: Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood: Nominated for a fourth time for the Booker

By BBC News Online's Darren Waters

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood's 10th novel, was her fourth to be shortlisted by the Booker panel but her first to take the prize.

Atwood was certainly the most high profile and critically acclaimed of the shortlisted writers.

A native of Ottawa, Ontario, she has attained the misleading tag of a women's issues novelist.

Her most famous novel, and arguably her best, The Handmaid's Tale, is a dark sci-fi tale of a society where women are used for breeding.

But if her novels have a thread it is her capacity to describe pain, its causes and consequences.

Margaret Atwood: Canda's most illustrious author

Her latest novel is a complex piece of work, packed full of literary devices which can often confuse and mislead.

It centres on two sisters, Iris and Laura, and the events surrounding Laura's mysterious and tragic death.

If the book has a flaw it is that it is too self-conscious and reflexive a piece of literature.

In many ways she is an old-fashioned writer - she always knew she was going to write from the age of 16 and had been writing poems and plays since she was six.

She hand-printed her first book herself and her work encompasses poetry, short fiction, novel's, children's books, non-fiction books, and television and radio scripts.

When she started writing in the late 60s Canadian literature was an empty wilderness, but it was that lack of history of overbearing giants that helped her plough her own furrow.

"I didn't fell all those genius men hanging over me," she has said.

RSI

"Canada was wide open prairie."

Since then she has dominated the literary landscape and has been joined by Michael Ondaatje, a former Booker winner, and Carol Shields.

In her native country she is a celebrity - she suffers from RSI because of the number of book signings she has attended.

The degree of pain in her novels, and the acute description of it, has led many critics to speculate that the writer herself has suffered in the past

But she pours scorn on such speculation.

"It's in my work because it's in the world," she said in a recent interview.

There were many who felt that she deserved the Booker Prize on the strength of her writing over the last 30 years.