Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood, born 1939 in Ottawa, Canada, is a force to be reckoned with in 20th and 21st Century literature. She grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec and in Toronto. Her education was Canadian with a salting of graduate work at Radcliffe and Harvard in the US. She can turn a skilled hand to short stories, poetry, essays and reviews, and novels. She is an enthusiastic transgressor of categories, so-called literary genres, and she is generous with introductions, forewords, and prefaces to other writers. She wants to comprehend it all, and she wants her readers to keep up.
I was very fortunate to support Atwood when she gave a talk at Dickinson College, providing books and sales support after her presentation. We had a chance to really talk. I was amazed by her sophisticated grasp of the book business (most writers really don’t care, which I think is odd). She was keen, alert, full of questions, interested. We seemed to hit it off as cousin-professionals. I always appreciate her for it and am grateful for her generosity.
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
A marvelous collection of wide-ranging essays from the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, exploring her lifelong relationship to science fiction—as a reader and as a writer
At a time when the borders between genres are increasingly porous, she maps the fertile crosscurrents of speculative and science fiction, utopias, dystopias, slipstream, and fantasy, musing on the age-old human impulse to imagine new worlds. She shares the evolution of her personal fascination with SF, from her childhood invention of a race of flying superhero rabbits to her graduate study of its Victorian antecedents to the creation of her own acclaimed novels.
Studded with appreciations of such influential writers as Marge Piercy, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kazuo Ishiguro, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Jonathan Swift, In Other Worlds is as humorous and charming as it is insightful and provocative.