Margaret Laurence remains one of Canada's best-known and most beloved writers. Twice winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction, her novels and short stories are known to readers throughout the world. Laurence's fictional characters such as Hagar from The Stone Angel and Morag in The Diviners are among the most compelling and powerful in modern fiction. By the time of her death in 1986, the Toronto Globe and Mail could write that Laurence was "more profoundly admired than any other Canadian novelist of her generation."