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Controversial, outspoken, and always challenging, Canadian-born Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s most celebrated and visionary authors. She has written over 20 novels, several short stories, children’s books, and numerous anthologies of poetry in a career spanning over five decades.

Atwood has won over 50 awards for her writing including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C Clarke Award and the LA Times Fiction Award. Here are six special reasons to read her work…

“My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seemed to have suffered,” she once explained to Judy Klemesrud in the New York Times. From that perspective she has examined female characters within current and future repressive patriarchal societies, most famously in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale – a dystopian futuristic vision where women are kept as slaves by men in order to breed.

In her poetry she examines the negative roles of women in society. The poem Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing portrays the reality of a woman seen as an object by men, with limited choices. It also examines how the objectification of women defines the role men play in this same situation.

Atwood is often reluctant to use the word "feminist" to describe her work, claiming that novels like The Handmaid’s Tale are based solely on reality, about things that have actually occurred, and are not ideological blueprints. Interviewed in the LA Times recently and asked whether it was a feminist manifesto, she responded with “I didn’t put anything into the book that has not happened sometime, somewhere. Or wasn’t happening then and isn’t happening now. So you can call that feminist, if you like. I didn’t start from ideology, I started from what I was collecting and seeing.”

Atwood disputes the term "science fiction", preferring to call her futuristic novels like The Handmaid’s Tale "speculative fiction" which she feels does not deal in absurdities. “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen,” she declared in a article.

However one chooses to call the prescient future worlds she cannily envisages in such novels as Oryx And Crake (part of The Maddaddam Trilogy) – a world environmentally decimated by mega-corporations and inhabited by genetically modified creatures – one cannot fail to be swept up by the complex and chilling fable she presents.

Although well-known for her dystopian futures, Atwood is no less an expert at delving into history in order to explore the themes that interest her. One of her most accomplished forays into this genre is Alias Grace. Set in the 19th century, it revolves around the double murder of a landlord and housekeeper – the alleged perpetrators are two servants, one of whom is the alluring Grace Marks. The physical and moral difficulties for women of the time are meticulously outlined, but Grace Marks herself is a complex character – we never feel truly convinced that she is both innocent and a victim of the times, or capable of being guilty of the crime of which she is initially convicted. Atwood leaves us guessing, as lies and deceit are skilfully woven into a dense and fascinating study.

Many of Atwood's works take traditional myths and use these as a basis for a new narrative or poem. The Penelopiad is a rewrite of Homer’s The Odyssey from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her 12 maids, and is used as a vehicle to highlight the role of narrative in myth by women, with all the motifs this alternate viewpoint brings to light.

In The Robber Bride – one of her most powerful novels – the three women protagonists have been seen as symbolising the Triple Goddess or White Goddess. This ancient matriarchal myth represents female strength, power and creativity.

The Hag Seed is a brilliant contemporary reinterpretation of The Tempest and sees Atwood at her mischievous best. The story of Felix, a wronged Canadian theatre director, is a gleeful revenge drama with nods to contemporary topical ideas. It manages to keep Shakespeare’s original story firmly in its sights, while being a thrilling tale in its own right.

She is simply a brilliant storyteller and is at home taking us on a Victorian thrill ride (as in in the aforementioned Alias Grace), but equally adept at exploring the difficulties of self-esteem and bullying within teenage relationships in Cat’s Eye. She supplies readers with humour and wit in The Door, and even probes the world of vampires and revenge in Stone Mattress.

All of this is done with a depth and acute awareness of other perspectives, often that of women. She is always challenging us with intellectual meat on which to chew, even with her most seemingly straightforward writing – a rare and original literary voice in our turbulent times, and one we should cherish.

Listen to Margaret Atwood discussing The Handmaid's Tale on Bookclub.