Six essentials: Margaret Atwood
Introducing six diverse titles from the much-loved Canadian author.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, fiction and critical essays. She’s one of only a handful of writers to win the Man Booker Prize twice, and she’s likely the only author to have also won the Arthur C Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, among dozens of literary prizes. She has honorary degrees from more than 20 universities around the world, and is a Member of the Order of Canada. Her book The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a multi award-winning TV series, on which she also earned writer and producer credits. And beyond her novels, poetry and essays, Atwood has also published several short story collections, children’s books, TV scripts and opera libretti.
Atwood’s is a bibliography so hefty it can be tricky to know where to start. In celebration of the wondrous diversity of her oeuvre, and the publication of Dearly – Atwood’s first poetry anthology in a decade – here we introduce six of her essential titles.
By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in flux, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire – neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
In the electrifying 2019 sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the question: What happened to Offred? The Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime come face to face with the ruthless Aunt Lydia.
Can we ever be wholly free?
In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret Atwood holds a mirror up to our own world. The reflection we are faced with, of men and women in prisons literal and metaphorical, is frightening, but it is also a call to arms to speak and to act to preserve our freedom while we still can. And in that, there is hope.
Shakespeare’s play of magic and illusion, The Tempest, reimagined by one of the world’s great literary innovators.
After an act of unforeseen treachery, theatre director Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge. After twelve years, payback finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him.
Famously inspired by fairy tales, myths, the environment and visions of the future, The Tempest is a perfect alignment with critically acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, activist and inventor Margaret Atwood. Her fantastical take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, revenge and second chances, Hag-Seed leads readers on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own.
‘The Tempest is, in some ways, an early multi-media musical,’ she says. ‘If Shakespeare were working today he’d be using every special effect technology now makes available. But The Tempest is especially intriguing because of the many questions it leaves unanswered. What a strenuous pleasure it has been to wrestle with it!’
Cat’s Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman—but above all she must seek release form her haunting memories. Disturbing, humorous, and compassionate – and a finalist for the Booker Prize – Cat’s Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life.
