Award-winning Atwood demonstrates the ethical and political potential of literature

What characterises Margaret Atwood’s writing?

Margaret Atwood is a master storyteller. She uses myths, fairy tales and techniques from the narrative universe to draw her readers into her stories. Her oeuvre is quite unusual because she writes in many genres, including poetry, short stories, novels and essays, but a particularly notable characteristic of Atwood is that she writes within the genre of speculative fiction.

This genre is about the future, but the narratives do not play out in some imaginary isolated universe. Rather, they are rooted in the world we live in, and in this way the genre predicts a future that can be said to be plausible.

Atwood was born in Canada in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. The War has had a strong influence on her writing, in which there is a clear preoccupation with describing massive social crises and how society is affected as a result.

She writes about death, about what human life means, about disasters and breakdowns, about gender and power dynamics, climate change and aging. All of which take place in universes that are rewarding to read as stories, but which also embody an inherent social criticism and a direct link to important current societal issues.
 
What is special about Atwood is that she is a tremendously ethical writer in the sense that she is concerned with showing the complexity of human experience and how on both an individual and a systemic level there is potential for both good and evil, and that both of these things exist side by side.

Why is Margaret Atwood an interesting voice in modern literature?

It is interesting in itself – and quite unusual – that Atwood writes a great deal of socially critical literature, while at the same time she is a critically acclaimed and best-selling author. I think it is because she manages to write intelligently and also often with humour and great irony about some serious subjects.

She demonstrates the ethical and political potential of literature by weaving a social critique into her stories and encouraging readers to relate to this by making use of the techniques of narrative and speculative fiction.

In this way, she makes it possible for the reader to imagine the future differently and thus challenges the reader’s view of trends in current society by creating a reflection on what those trends can bring with them if we push them to their full extent. This undertaking and this ability make her incredibly interesting as a writer.

What role has Atwood played in literature and the surrounding society over time?

Looking back on the past 50 years of her writing, it is clear that her pen has been like a seismograph of society, registering the major societal changes of the last decades. Her earliest novel, The Edible Woman (1969), has often been considered a proto-feminist work, and her novels Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assasin (2000) illustrate that the way talk about the past affects the present.

She has witnessed landmark events and changes in society and public opinion. She has seen political issues flare up and subside again, but in her literature she has managed to maintain a long and useful perspective on social and political issues. 

For instance, this can be seen in her depiction of the rise of religious right-wing regimes in The Handmaid’s Tale and in the depiction of a massive environmental collapse in the novel Oryx and Crake.

When she published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she demonstrated how literary fiction could include speculative elements and function as a commentary on what was happening in American society even then.

But she has also shown us how literature can have a direct social use. For instance, during Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, protesters used costumes and iconography from The Handmaid’s Tale as symbols in their protests.

In this way, Atwood was, and still is, a significant writer of her time and has played a central role in bringing Canadian literature to global significance.

What does Atwood’s writing tell us about the times we live in?

There is much from Atwood’s writing that can tell us something about the times we live in because her works always have this long societal perspective and have dealt with themes that are highly topical today.

For instance, an interesting aspect of the novel Oryx and Crake, published in 2003, is that she sets out a kind of recipe for disaster for what could happen if people focus only on technological innovations and what these innovations can do, without paying attention to the whole spectrum of human values and human meaning.

She shows in the novel how such a focus can lead to a complete collapse of society. I think that’s a very useful message for our times and our strong belief in technological progress.

An older work such as The Handmaid’s Tale is also hugely relevant today, as it unfolds some predictions about what will happen in relation to the politically powerful right wing.

The novel explores an awareness of how women’s bodies can be used for social control: the society in the novel uses women’s bodies for reproduction and to oppress women. That novel relates directly to the discourse we are seeing today in the American states about women’s right to abortion.

And in Atwood’s latest book, the story ‘My Evil Mother’ (2023) tackles a highly topical subject, illuminated by a long-term perspective. The book is about the experience of old age and how society deals with an ever-expanding aging population. In this respect, Atwood presents various imagined scenarios of what could happen.

You will be speaking with Atwood at the awards ceremony. What are you particularly looking forward to speaking with her about?

I would like to ask her if she feels optimistic about the role of literature in society. Looking at the subjects she has dealt with critically, it doesn’t always seem like there has been much progress, so I would like to hear about her view on literature as a force for social change.

It is always difficult to pinpoint how literature affects the world, but Atwood has nevertheless managed to show the potential of literature to do so. As I’ve already mentioned, we saw this when demonstrators protested against a concrete political reality by holding up signs with texts such as ‘Keep the handmaid’s tale fictitious’.

I read that novel when I was in high school and was very inspired, so I must admit that I’m really looking forward to being allowed to sit across from her and hear how, at the age of 83, you still manage to be so curious, critical and engaged with the world.