AUTHOR

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. ‘Her sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. It was an instant international bestseller and won the Booker Prize.’ Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Photo credit: Liam Sharp

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Featured Book

Critical Listening

Full disclosure: The Handmaid's Tale is my favorite book. It is my number one all-time pick among books, the book of my life, having topped my list since I first read it in 2008. But for all my love of The Handmaid's Tale, and my belief that it's a perfect book, I've always been—again like a fan girl—a little irked by one aspect of it: its ending. "Are there any questions?" may be the most wonderfully frustrating last line ever conceived. YES I have questions— MANY of them. In producing this special edition, we proposed that Margaret Atwood answer some of those long standing questions. So what was it like to ask a Booker Prize-winning author to amend the ending of her most famous work? I felt pretty presumptuous to say the least. But Margaret’s response—and I think I’m quoting this correctly—was, ‘Sure, this sounds like fun.’ And indeed it was fun. The ten audio-only questions included in this production present a teasing look at the world beyond Offred, and a glimpse of what Atwood might have up her sleeve next.

Emily C.

Audible Editor

Mentions

PLAYLIST

Margaret Atwood's Favorite Speculative Fiction

Margaret Atwood explains the difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi, and recommends some of her favorites.

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Behind the Scenes

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Three Day Road By: Joseph Boyden

“A First World War book with a difference, chronicling the role of the Indigenous hunters who became sure-shot snipers, and the many wounds inflicted by and upon them.”

And Then There Were None By: Agatha Christie

“When my mother was over 90 and blind, her family relead to her — as she read to us when we were small. We discovered that Agatha Christie was very well-suited to being read aloud: succinct sentences, finger-biting plot. Ten corpses on an island, with no way on or off. ”

Treasure Island By: Robert Louis Stevenson, Marty Ross - adaptation

“Stevenson’s excellent prose and story-telling skill are perfectly suited to oral presentation. There’s a reason why this pirate-adventure book is a classic. ("Pieces of eight!") ”