MARGARET ATWOOD
Famed author and poet Margaret Atwood, a giant of Canadian literature, is remarkably down to earth, the co-directors of the 2019 documentary, Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power, told National Post’s Chris Knight.
Critics say her work has never been more relevant in an era of authoritarianism and looming synthetic wombs. At 84, the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, children’s books and graphic novels, Atwood was recently honoured as a writer “whose work expresses a rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the world and our place in it.”
The literary giant has recently pushed back against U.S. school board censorship of her classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as pirated copies of her books being used to train AI chatbots.
Handmaid’s Tale would sell more than eight million copies in English globally. The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel, was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. The acclaimed feminist icon has been described as “arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world.”
She is, by nature, a hopeful person, she told she told the CBC Radio’s Matt Galloway last year. “Hope is part of our human beingness.”
She told Wired getting old “is more fun than you think.
“As long as you’re not actually dying or having dementia, you just have a lot less to lose . ... People are afraid of being beaten up by their peers on social media. They haven’t been hardened in the fire,” Atwood said.
“If you have been hardened, you can just let it rip.”