MARGARET ATWOOD, Canadian feminist author and activist, 81, has sold millions of copies of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and criticism. She won the Booker prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000, and has had five other novels shortlisted. The TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of ecological meltdown and totalitarian regime, has made her a superstar. Her latest collection of poetry, Dearly, New Poems, has just been published …
SHE DOES
FEEL surprised by her success. “I’m a serious writer. I never expected to become a popular one.”
CREDIT her isolated childhood in the wilds of Canada with making her fearless and pragmatic.
HAVE an interest in military history. As a child she used to re-enact the Battle of Waterloo with her teddies.
RECALL how she became a writer when, at 16, she made up a poem in her head while crossing a football field. After studying at the University of Toronto, then Harvard, her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969.
ENJOY the status of prophet for creating stories about climate disaster and societies ruled by misogynists, years before they were on most people’s radar.
QUESTION what feminism is: “Do we mean women are better than men? Do we mean all men should be pushed off a cliff? What do we mean? Because that word has meant all of those different things.”
MISS her late husband, novelist and ecological campaigner Graeme Gibson: “It’s not sex you miss, it’s love.”
HAVE one daughter, Jess, born in 1976, now an art historian who lives in Brooklyn with Atwood’s grandson.
SEIZE every opportunity for fun. Once, she stood in front of a packed-out theatre and sang the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana before performing bird calls.
INFLUENCE fashion. Whistles’s autumn 2019 womenswear collection was dominated by the same lime green colour scheme as Noma Bar’s eye-popping jacket design for The Testaments.
LOVE a prank. She once tricked a new editor into thinking she could speak Anglo-Saxon.
SHE DOESN’T
BELIEVE that if women ruled the world, it would be entirely different. “She’s pro-women but she doesn’t want to whitewash the truth,” says a friend.
PRETEND to be run-of-the-mill. “I wasn’t a usual kind of high-school student. I was a very peculiar university student and it continued on from there.”
SHY AWAY from new media, mastering both Twitter (2m followers) and Instagram. She even shared a Spotify playlist she made to accompany the publication of The Testaments in 2019.
TIRE easily. She is fiercely productive – baking pies, hosting dinners, knitting sweaters, signing books and lending support to charities and community campaigns.
SUFFER fools gladly. Friends say she can be very tough. “I’ve seen her make strong women quail,” says one.
OVEREAT. She is disciplined about her diet.
LIKE to disappoint her fans. She invented a remote booksigning technology, the LongPen, which allows her to sign books for fans all over the world.
HIDE her admiration for Dolly Parton: “There’s no secret Dolly Parton who is an evil human being.”
OVERPLAY her importance. “I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
HAVE any time for Brexit. “It is another predictable mess that people got drawn into because a big honking pack of lies was told about it.”
DISMISS organised religion: “Religion has been used as a hammer to whack people on the heads with. But it also is a sustaining set of beliefs that gets people through.”
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