Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood sat down recently with Michael Enright at an event for supporters of the Literary Review of Canada. For more than a half-hour, they talked about the digital world, the origins of The Handmaid’s Tale, the early days on the book promotion circuit, and even garter belts. These are excerpts from their…

This fall sees the publication of not one but two works by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood: a fictional adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and a graphic novel, her first. Hag-Seed is the fourth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project in which contemporary authors, including (so far) Jeannette Winterson and Howard Jacobson, reimagine their favourite plays by the…

For how long have observers been concerned about the possibility of sexual bias in Canadian book reviewing? A good case could be made that the initial analysis of the issue dates back to 1971 in a York University seminar room. Margaret Atwood was teaching a course entitled Canadian Women Writers, and as part of the coursework she and her students undertook an innovative project attempting to identify and measure the extent of sexual bias in Canadian book …

Azar Nafisi’s engrossing Reading Lolita in Tehran is the sort of book that ruins the sleep of those in charge of placing books in bookstores. Where to shelve it? Under literary criticism? No, for although it subjects a number of classics to revealing scrutiny, that would miss much of its point. Under memoirs? Similar problems: although its story is intertwined with the life of its…