For years now award winning author Margaret Atwood has insisted that her novels aren’t science fiction, as everything she writes either has happened or could happen today (acclaimed science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin disagrees). She prefers to describe her work as Speculative Fiction. In her most recent book “In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination”, however, she “lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as “science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer.” Listen to Atwood discuss her latest work with NPR’s On Point.
MARGARET ATWOOD is the internationally acclaimed author of more than forty books. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Among the awards and honours she has received are the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Premio Mondello (Italy), the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature (Spain), the Dan David Prize (Israel), and the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto.
