Margaret Atwood

Author

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist. She is best known for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history. In addition to the Arthur C. Clark Award-winning "The Handmaid’s Tale," her novels include "Cat’s Eye," which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, "Alias Grace," which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and "The Blind Assassin," winner of the 2000 Booker Prize. "Oryx and Crake" was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008. Her most recent novel is "The Year of the Flood."

The Present

Anti-Intellectualism Exists for a Reason – but Not a Good One

Only two things will change the minds of science skeptics: appeals to their ego, or their wallets.

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Margaret Atwood

The Present

Want Meaningful Prisoner Reform? Try Shakespeare, Says Margaret Atwood

What happens when Shakespeare goes to prison? His works humanize prisoners and open them up to reform in a way that the prison system fails to, says author Margaret Atwood.

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8 min

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Margaret Atwood

Why I Write Speculative Fiction

The problem with speculative fiction is what might be called "the tour of the garbage disposal plant," in which somone says to the visiting character, “Well in your day, you did this terribly inefficient thing, but now we have this wonderful garbage disposal plant.”

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Why We Tell Stories

The art of narration may have emerged as an evolutionary adaptation, says the author. “If I can tell you that right over there in that river was where the crocodile […]

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5 min

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Margaret Atwood

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The Neurology of Reading

Reading may have evolved from early hunters’ skills of interpreting animal tracks, which allowed them to find food and determine whether they themselves were being hunted.

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4 min

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Margaret Atwood

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Three Reasons to Keep Physical Books

Books are important because electronic storage is fairly fragile. That said, e-books provide many advantages, especially for those with dyslexia and other reading disabilities.

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3 min

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Margaret Atwood

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Understanding Canadian Humor

The author tells us a Canadian sex joke.

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1 min

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Margaret Atwood

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Learning to Hide the Exposition

Authors are always trying to disguise which parts of the novel were most difficult to write. For Atwood those parts are always the exposition, she says.

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Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood’s Creative Process

For the author, it’s not a question of sitting around and wondering what to write; it’s a question of deciding which of the “far-fetched and absurd” ideas she’s going to […]

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How Twitter Is Like African Tribal Drums

New forms of communication are just modernizations of things that already existed earlier in some other form, says the author.

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3 min

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Margaret Atwood

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How to Tweet Like Margaret Atwood

The sprightly 71-year-old has really taken to Twitter and now has over 85,000 followers.

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4 min

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Margaret Atwood

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The Challenge of Speculative Fiction

The author grew up reading books like “1984” and “Brave New World” and wanted to solve the problem to which these types of books so often fall prey—too much exposition.

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Margaret Atwood