![]() ![]() With rich world-building and unexpected characterizations and inventive plots, she invites us to look behind and beyond our privilege and to be made uncomfortable by what we see. Never didactic, always good humored and generous, Atwood does just that. If serious writers have the duty to bear witness, warn, admonish, and instruct, they also have the obligation to entertain us, to draw us in, to make the experience worth the candle. This is serious stuff, and Atwood is serious about educating her readers, both showing us our complicity and reintroducing us to our better angels. Feminism shapes her exploration of all pressing issues, from civil rights and gender equality to environmentalism, sustainability, education, the lasting impact of colonialism and casualties of empire, criminal justice and incarceration, or consumer capitalism. What is the gothic, after all, but the underside of domestic realism? What are speculative fictions like two Gilead novels and the three Maddaddam novels, after all, but detection tales of crimes against humanity or the environment played out on a massive social scale? Atwood is a feminist first and foremost, making women’s lives and experiences under patriarchy central to her work. The sheer number and diversity of these honors is testament to the diversity of genres and modes she confidently deploys, mixes, juggles, and inverts. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature and Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction. The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps her best-known work of fiction, was shortlisted the Booker while garnering the Arthur C. She has won the Booker Prize twice-for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, in 2019. ![]() From The Handmaids Tale (1985) on, her novels have been nominated or shortlisted for multiple international awards for fiction, science fiction, or fantasy. Over a career that spans more than 50 years, Margaret Atwood has been that rarest of writers.Ī prolific writer, Atwood is the author of seventeen published novels, ten collections of short fiction, twenty collections of poetry, seven children’s books, and ten works of nonfiction, literary or cultural criticism and has edited several anthologies of Canadian fiction. Rarest of all is the writer who can do all that with a light touch, in a style both erudite and accessible, ethical and satirical, humane and humorous. Rarer still is the writer who can depict our near futures so uncannily, predicting every wrong step we will take to get there. It is not often that a writer achieves both widespread critical respect and popular success while tackling the most pressing social justice and ecological issues of her or his time. We could certainly use a little hope, right about now.” ![]() ![]() If I feel I know you, understand you, and like you, why would I wish to make war on you? Perhaps that is the way in which reading is conducive to peace: it brings us closer together. The closer we are to a person, the psychiatrists tell us, the harder it is to actually murder them. Readers can read across the whole sweep of human experience – as far back in the past as they can see, as far afield as they can reach, as far into the future as it is possible to imagine. Writers are limited in their range – in what they are able to write about –whereas readers are not. And if the characters are from other places or other cultures, it becomes less and less possible to dismiss such people as not like us and therefore not our fellow mortals. If the fiction presents its characters in the round – what they think, what they feel, who they love and fear – it’s impossible not to realize that those being read about are as human as those doing the reading. Early writing was used to record inventories and to praise rulers, but not to encourage peace.īut fiction writing is different. “ What does writing have to do with peace? Writing as the placing of words on surfaces – clay, stone, papyrus, vellum, paper – not much. ![]()
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